I love chess! I am rated around 1,700 points and play at least couple of games daily. In addition to playing chess, I frequently read various chess books, solve chess problems, etc. One of the most effective ways to sharpen my chess-playing skills has been achieved by playing chess variants. Simply put, chess variants take the traditional chess game and modify its rules. This puts the chess player in an “out of the box” situation in which he or she has to rework the existing strategic and tactical thinking while taking into consideration a number of new factors.

I recently came across a powerful little chess variation browsing for chess games in Apple’s App Store. It is called ChessQueens and is a chess variant played with only queens and kings. You and your opponent get 15 queens and one king each. All of the other chess pieces are gone, but the standard chess rules do apply. ChessQueens really makes you realize the power of a single chess piece type — queen in this instance. With a total of 30 queens on the game board, both attacks and defenses are fluid with a lot of sacrifices being made to achieve a better overall group position. There is no castling and en passant since there are no other pieces. This throws out the window a number of standard ways of thinking, which is exactly the fresh angle at playing chess one needs to improve their game by realizing the power behind a combination of certain pieces.

The iPhone game ChessQueens is itself of overall high quality. The graphics are Spartan at best, but the gameplay is truly great. One can play in both single-player and multiplayer modes. In the single-player mode, the player plays against a computer tackling 10 levels of increasingly hard artificial intelligence. In the multiplayer mode, the player can play against another player locally by sharing the same iPhone and taking turns on it, or he or she can connect to another person over the Internet (3G or WiFi).

At only 99 cents ChessQueens is worth every penny, even if you are a casual chess player. For those of us who play and study the game regularly, ChessQueens represents yet another great little tool to hone our chess-playing skills in a truly original way.