Chess Burst Support

Contact us

Email support@egretstudio.com and we will get back to you, usually within two business days. We are a small studio in Florida, so replies come from a human rather than a ticket system.

If you are reporting a problem, the three things that help most are: what you expected to happen, what happened instead, and your device model and OS version. A screenshot is worth a lot.

How do I play?

The board is six columns by nine rows and is always full. You command both armies — ivory and obsidian alike. Tap a piece to select it, and every legal target lights up. Tap one to capture.

• Pieces capture the way they move in chess. A rook along ranks and files, a bishop diagonally, a knight by its L, and so on.
• You can only capture the opposite colour. Ivory takes obsidian, obsidian takes ivory.
• Rays pass through your own side. A queen’s line slides past friendly pieces and clears the enemy ray you chose.
• The attacker moves in. After a capture your piece lands on the square it just took, and everything above falls to fill the gaps.

Clearing four or more pieces at once is a Burst and adds two seconds; six or more is a Grand Burst and adds three.

The Red hazards, and the one rule that matters

Each cycle puts one Red piece on the board as your objective. Kill it and the cycle resets with a fresh clock.

• The Red King turns neighbouring pieces to stone. Stone cannot be captured and blocks lines, but it falls like anything else — and killing the King turns all of it back at double value.
• The Red Queen drains your cycle clock while she is on the board.
• The Red Knight spreads. Every so often one more piece an L-jump away becomes another Red Knight, and the cycle ends only when every one of them is dead.

A Red hazard can only be killed by a live piece of its own type. A Red Queen needs a queen, a Red Knight needs a knight. This is the rule the whole hunt turns on, and it has one deliberate asymmetry worth knowing: a capture only works on the opposite colour, but a kill accepts a piece of that type from either colour. Select the killer, tap the hazard, and it dies — nothing is ever taken off the board that you did not tap.

I ran out of moves, or the board filled with stone

If no capture exists anywhere, the board reshuffles itself and play continues — that is never a loss. A run ends in only two ways: the cycle clock reaching zero, or so much of the board turning to stone that nothing can be done at all.

After a timed run ends you may be offered a Revive, which is always your choice and never a surprise. It returns fifteen seconds — or, if stone is what ended the run, it shatters the stone instead, because more time on a locked board would not help.

I paid to remove ads and they came back

Open Settings → Restore purchases. This is the normal path after reinstalling the game or moving to a new device — purchases follow your store account, not the hardware, and restoring costs nothing.

If it still says the ads are not removed, make sure you are signed in to the same account that made the purchase, then write to us at support@egretstudio.com and we will help.

Removing ads takes away the ads shown between runs. The optional “watch an ad to revive” offer stays available, because that one is always your choice.

My score isn't on the leaderboard

Three things account for almost every case:

• Vigil runs are never submitted. Vigil has no timer and no game over, so its scores are not comparable. Siege and Onslaught are ranked, and each has its own separate board.
• Game Center has to be signed in. iOS asks once, when the game launches. If you dismissed it, your scores are kept and sent the next time you play with Game Center available — nothing is lost in the meantime.
• Only your best score shows. Game Center keeps your highest result per board, so a lower run will not replace it.

Settings, and making the game easier to read

Everything below is in the game’s own Settings, reachable from the title screen or the pause menu.

• Difficulty — Vigil, Siege or Onslaught. Vigil is endless practice with no clock. A change applies to your next run, never the one in progress.
• Colourblind rings — shifts the selection and target rings to a palette checked against the common forms of colour blindness. The rings differ in shape and position as well as colour, so colour is never the only signal.
• Reduce motion — turns off screen shake and the heavier effects. Every rule, and every piece of state feedback, stays exactly the same.
• Haptics — the taps you feel while playing.
• Music and Effects — independent volume sliders, so you can keep one and mute the other.
• Replay tutorial — the full seven-step walkthrough, any time. The hazard half can be replayed on its own.

Does Chess Burst need an account?

No. There is no sign-up, no password, and nothing to log in to. Your scores, settings and progress live on your device, and deleting the game deletes them. There is no product analytics and no crash reporting — the game does not measure how you play.

Where the law requires it, Settings also carries an Ad privacy settings row, which reopens the advertising choices you were asked about. The privacy policy covers what is collected and by whom.

Something else

Bugs, a board that behaved oddly, a feature you want, or a translation you would like to see — support@egretstudio.com reaches us either way. We read all of it.