The Queen's Gambit Chess

Experienced players will find it patronising, but it’s a non-intimidating start for beginners.

The Queen’s Gambit Chess does its best to motivate you to play chess, and to keep playing chess. But whether this will transfer to real life, where Beth’s vision and markers on the board don’t exist is hard to see. However, it will certainly make you feel like a genius even when starting out, and that is as much as you can ask for a chess app.

If you have Netflix it doesn’t cost you anything to try the game, and if you’re a fan of the show and somehow aren’t that familiar with chess, I encourage you to give it a shot. Queen’s Gambit Chess will assuredly teach you how to play the game, so if that is what you’re looking for you’re all set. But it will only take you so far, choosing to show you what to do instead of teaching you what to do. Experienced chess players will probably find it a bit unsatisfying overall thanks to the low level of difficulty and excessive handholding. Throw in some fairly serious technical issues in the current version that deeply affects multiplayer and you’ve got a game that struggles to find its own winning move.

It feels like a missed opportunity, arriving a couple of years too late to take full advantage of Beth Harmon's popularity and the mass numbers of new players that came from that. But even if the release were more timely, as a learning tool it falls significantly short, lacking a clear enough vision in its puzzles and features to steer players in the right direction.