Magnus Trainer - Train Chess Wiki

In This app there are a LOT of lessons about things you will see in chess, it has very simple lessons in which you sometimes find the solution and you don't even get punished for it in lessons. Then there are the challenges, the good thing is that you can choose your difficulty without having to complete the basics and level up, there are basic, easy, medium and hard challenges. It is easy to understand and it is kinda entertaining not just because the chess part, but the music the happiness and Magnus's Funny face expressions after every turn. So i would recommend to give this a try if you enjoy chess.

I played chess as a child and teenager but hadn’t played in a long time. I was looking for help starting back up as an adult while also looking for something fun to do with my son. My son is very high energy and does have problems with attention. I was hoping I could help him learn chess as a way to spend quality time with him but also stimulate his mind, as chess is a very complex game. This app has made learning chess fun, exciting and much easier than a stuffy book with rules. Thank you so much for helping me enjoy the game again and also for being able to share this with my son. It’s made a lot of difference!

This chess trainer is really, really, really good. I’ve tried chess trainers before, but this one seems to work really well with a combination of lessons, exercises and practice. It feels a bit prosaic at first, but follow the lessons, do the exercises and it really starts to build skill in building blocks that really work. I’m only at early stages, but seeing a big difference by Level 38 (medium difficulty) and still have a long way to go. I just discovered the stats and tracking and it’s fascinating. The app can develop and track you all the way to mastery and at this stage that’s a very believable capability. Super good.

I have lichess and I’m not great at it so I had a pretty low rating number even though I’ve been playing for a while. After completing just the easy section on the magnus app, the way I thought about chess was completely changed and games that I would never have won before have become extremely easy to me. My rating has already gone up over 200 points and it still on an upwards trend! Some of the games are a little bit weird in my opinion, but the lessons and the rajas riddles are very intuitive, interactive, and helpful!

Like so many, after watching The Queen’s Gambit, I felt the need to properly learn more than just how the chess pieces move. It’s worth paying for the full membership to get the full lessons, which are easy to follow and interesting. There are numerous games to improve tactics and speed of comprehension of what you are seeing on the board. There are extra lessons being added all the time making it like a never-ending instructional book. I particularly enjoyed the lessons analyzing games from The Queen’s Gambit. I just wish I could flag lessons & games that I want to revisit later.

I play this app a lot and love trying to 3-Star the different games. One thing though, and I have seen other reviews like this before is that some of the Croc Tamer Levels are physically impossible to 3-star. You have to fully wait for the croc to land on its square even if it’s a knight moving all the way across the board for example, and if the 4th or 5th croc is the one that makes a wrong move, too much time is eaten up waiting for animations. Even tapping as fast as possible does not achieve a 3-Star. Test Croc Tamer Level 9 in Session 32 with the only intention of 3-starring it to see what I mean. Perhaps there is a part of that gameplay that I am missing? I have 3-starred Croc Tamer 1-8, and have 2-starred every other available Croc Tamer above that. It’s also somewhat confusing just what criteria unlocks levels as a free to play player. I have 3-starred every level my Dad has even attempted, yet he has “Hanging Pawns” lesson unlocked, and I cannot figure out how to unlock it. Do different accounts have random extra lessons unlocked?

Its obvious a huge amount of effort went into this app, but I think there some things Id still like to see different. One example is it would be awesome if there was a “sandbox” mode. One where you could control all pieces on the board/ability to move all pieces into a desired position before initiating play. Do for example you start “sandbox mode”, you set up the board however you like then once you’re done you can allow AI to come in and start playing from a pre-made board. Another thing Id LOVE to see is more functionality within the mini games, the mini games are already above and beyond my expectations for this app but the fact that you are only allowed to play them with semi-random pieces is kind of a disappointment. A way to fix this would be allowing players to choose which piece they play mini games with e.g. if I want to play a game with the knight only, I should be allowed to do so.

I’ve recently gotten back into chess and found that this app really helps in keeping me interested and showing me how to improve. I love their approach and style in the app and it really dose help (for example I’ve always been slow at finding specific squares on the chess board but after playing one of their mini games I’ve cut my time in half) It’s vary informative and interactive allowing you to not only study but to practice opening, checkmates, endgames, etc. I would love to give this app 5 stars but there’s still issues throughout the app, I’ve had crashes and bugs thrown at me randomly and I can’t complete some challenges because if I attempt them It’ll just crash or simply not work. The bugs are not frequent enough to make it unusable but it dose allow for some annoyance and missed learning opportunities.

It is a little difference and nice chess app. My first suggestions is please draw a line on the edge of the board. Or change the background color. Dark squares and background are in same color and chess board not look like a chess board. Especially on the edges, dark squares and background is merged and it is weird to play like this. My second suggestion is, it is good to provide some games without time restriction. For example I would like to study some positions in more relax state rather than solving quickly. It is ok that study mode doesn’t give any score or star. And it is ok that study mode won’t be available until you beat the challenge first. At the end of the day, I would like play/study the positions in more relaxed mode.

I chuckle every time I see Magnus do one of his silly responses to how you did on a given puzzle or when completing a lesson. I’m not a new chess player, but I’ve never really studied it before, and my word is there tons to learn. This App makes it easy to understand does a good job of not only explaining concepts, but showing them in practice, making it easier for all sorts of learners to grasp ahold of the important details. It feels like there’s a lot of content sitting behind the membership paywall, but this is a small complaint as there is still a plethora of activities available for the free members. In conjunction with the Play Magnus App, I’m having a wonderful time improving my gameplay, slowly but surely.

The app makes zero sense. I can do some of the mini-games WAY better than Magnus supposedly did, then the next level I can barely pass. There’s no reward for playing those well, they ultimately seem to serve no purpose. And the early levels are beyond frustrating when you’ve answered, “yes, I know how to play chess.” I don’t need a primer. Then, the lessons have no backing material. You basically have to read them over and over until you process it. Well, that’s not how I learn. I learn by doing. Not having some “play this lesson” options is a real detriment. I’m paying monthly, but I think as soon as I’m through all the lessons, I’ll stop. It’s just not worth it. Also, it focuses so much on what white does, what about black?! I think I just got the first, “this is how to play black” lesson yesterday, halfway through the medium difficulty.. huh?! And not only that, the board was the wrong way around to play black. Considering the companion app, Play Magnus, switches you back and forth every match, you’d think there would be a LITTLE attention paid to “the other side.” Last, but not least, hire someone who can read and write English properly. There are several grammatical mistakes in just the first half of the lessons. One or two make it really difficult to figure out what was meant. Unless you’re serious about chess, don’t pay for this. Even if you are, you’re probably better off studying with books...

The timing aspect is the elephant in the room. I understand it’s good to get facile enough to be able to do quick calculations... but pegging notation perfectly under time stress? Identifying illegal moves when 4 pieces are moving on the board? Capturing occasionally vanishing keys with multiple pieces moving on the board? I’m going to keep playing, but I fail to understand how these things are actually helping my chess playing, even in a timed setting. The best stuff is clearly the motifs, mate puzzles, lessons, and quick identifying of these. The rest feels like pointless, dexterity challenge to wear the player down to paying for the app, which I would have gladly done at the onset if I could skip all this nonsense with arbitrarily timed challenges that seem to have dubious positive value on OTB gameplay. tl;dr Two dots app model. Can’t blame people for making money, but wish 1/2 the energy went into making an app that focused purely on chess training.

First off great app. It’s like lichess if lichess had instructional videos behind a paywall(and I’m not even gonna mention chesscom)..so it’s actually good and we understand that money has to be made you know. Just one burning problem with the tactics games like the rajahs riddles. If we get the tactical idea wrong we CAN NOT see the solution???? I really don’t understand this functionality and it’s pretty annoying especially at the higher lessons like lessons 90+ where the problems require some calculation..I mean you spend some minutes on a tactical problem double check if you calculated correctly but you just missed some detail, click the wrong tactical idea and BOOM wrong next question...of course if you get the idea right but still miss something you can see the correct answer-you should still be able to see the solution if you get the idea wrong.

The app teaches chess in a format that allows people to carry over what they learn over to real games relatively easy, which I like. It gives a good bearing on fundamentals and basics and is overall a great app to learn from. However, I have to rate it two stars because of how the course path is horribly set up. You can’t skip through lessons that you don’t need to learn, so if you want to continue you have to suffer through learning what you already knew. But most importantly, the Raja’s riddle game needs serious tweaking. Some of the puzzles can be solved in multiple ways but the app only recognizes one. Furthermore, if you choose the wrong motif/mate, it doesn’t let you see the right answer, which holds back learning more than anything. Lastly, it’s stupid that you can’t skip the games in the lessons when it never tells you the right answers so you can learn anyway.