Chess (LittleJS Arcade)

There isn't a novel hook here — this is chess, played on a standard 8x8 board with the standard rules — so the entire question is execution, and the execution is clean. A dark, legible board renders correctly at both phone and desktop sizes, a title menu offers Player vs AI at a stated "Medium" difficulty, Player vs Player, an AI vs AI mode to just watch, an options screen and a help screen, and the whole thing is built on LittleJS, an actively developed open-source engine with a genuine following (over 4,100 GitHub stars) by the same author who built this arcade collection.

Touch was tested, not assumed

The interaction model is the simplest one chess allows on a touchscreen: tap a piece to select it, tap a legal destination to move it. That's exactly what was tested, twice, in separate sessions — tapping a pawn and then a square two ranks ahead moved the piece, the board re-rendered instantly, and the AI opponent picked up its turn with a visible "AI Thinking..." progress indicator before replying with a sensible developing move. Zero console errors and zero failed network requests came up in any test, on phone or desktop, and the identical select-then-move interaction was confirmed again with mouse clicks on a wider desktop layout, where the board and menu scale to a different but equally legible size. For a genre where the entire interaction is "point at a square twice," that's exactly what needs to work, and it does.

The one control element that didn't confirm cleanly was the on-screen undo icon in the top bar — tapping it during testing didn't visibly revert the last move. The keyboard shortcut (U) is documented on-screen as a fallback, so undo isn't unavailable, but the touch path for that specific feature wasn't verified working the way piece movement was.

A real feature set, not a single board

Beyond the core move mechanic, the menu system itself is worth noting: every option is a real tap target, from choosing an opponent type to opening the help screen, and the interface holds up at both the compact phone layout and the wider desktop one without anything getting cut off or overlapping. The AI opponent is a genuine engine, not a random-move bot — it took a measurable amount of "thinking" time and replied with a normal developing move rather than an obviously bad one, though a full game wasn't played out to judge its actual playing strength.

Final verdict

This isn't trying to reinvent chess, and it doesn't need to: it's a complete, correctly working implementation of a game people already want to play, with a touch control scheme that was tested directly and does exactly what it should on a real touchscreen. Combined with a credible, actively-maintained source and a clean bill of health on errors and network requests, that's enough to earn a spot on a shelf built around the promise that everything here actually works on a phone. Recommended.