How can I help?

Yes. The daily puzzle is a pure function of the calendar date — the app works it out from today's date and the puzzle library it already carries. There is no server picking one and sending it out.

That means everyone playing on the same date gets the same puzzle, so you can compare notes with a friend, and it also means the daily puzzle works with no signal at all.

By design. Monday starts at mate in two and the depth climbs to mate in four by the weekend, so the week has a shape to it. Whatever the depth, the promise is the same: it is a genuine forced mate with exactly one first move that works.

Alongside the daily, each week brings a track of forty puzzles that ramps from mate in two through mate in four. You can play them at your own pace in any order.

A new track drops every Monday, and the current one resets then. There are bonus coins at the halfway point (puzzle 20) and at the end (puzzle 40), shown right on the grid so you can see what you are working towards.

If you don't finish a track before Monday, it moves into the archive rather than disappearing — see the subscription questions below.

A streak is a run of daily puzzles solved on the day they belong to. That is deliberately narrow, and two things do not count:

• Weekly track solves don't move it. A long session on the forty-puzzle track is its own achievement; it doesn't build a daily streak.
• Archived catch-ups don't move it. Playing Wednesday's puzzle on Friday ticks that card and pays out its coins, but it cannot rebuild a broken run.

The reasoning is simple: a streak measures showing up, and a run you can buy back later measures nothing.

Because refusing it would tell you something. In Gambit you can move any piece to any square you can see, and the only reason a move is ever refused is that the square isn't on the board.

Wrong moves get played out and cost part of the move budget shown in the "X moves left" heading. Running out without mating is a loss — but a recoverable one. Undo rewinds you straight back into the position.

Hints cost 100 coins per tap, against 10, 15 or 20 coins earned per solve depending on depth. That is deliberately steep — a hint is meant to be a rare resource, not a routine assist. Walking all the way through a mate in four costs 800.

Each hint continues the real mating line. If you have already blundered, the first hint rewinds both sides back to the last good position before pointing anywhere, rather than hinting about a position that no longer has a mate in it.

You earn coins from solving, from milestone bonuses on the weekly track, and from a daily check-in bonus. You can also buy a coin pack if you'd rather not wait.

Each board is cropped to the squares the puzzle can actually reach, so the position fills the screen instead of floating in a sea of empty squares.

The crop is machine-verified rather than eyeballed: a position that reads as checkmate on your screen is checkmate on the full board too. And a brass stripe is drawn wherever the crop meets the real edge of the 8×8 — stripe means "pawns promote here", no stripe means the board continues past what you can see.

Entirely. Gambit makes no network calls of any kind — there is nothing to be offline from. Every puzzle you can reach is already in the app, the daily is computed from the date, and even the subscription check reads a receipt that is already on your device.

It behaves exactly the same in airplane mode as it does at home. That was the point.

Gambit Archive unlocks every past daily puzzle and every past weekly track since launch — the back catalogue grows by forty-seven puzzles a week. It comes as a monthly or an annual plan.

It is entirely optional. Today's puzzle, this week's forty-puzzle track, badges, coins and streaks are all free and need no purchase. The subscription buys you the days you missed.

Through Apple, which is where the subscription lives. Either:

• Open Settings in Gambit and tap Cancel Subscription, which takes you straight to Apple's page; or
• On your iPhone, open the Settings app → tap your name → Subscriptions → Gambit → Cancel Subscription.

Cancel at least 24 hours before the period ends to avoid the next renewal. You keep archive access until the end of the period you have already paid for; after that the past cards return to locked, and your progress on them is kept.

I can't cancel a subscription on your behalf — only Apple can, and only you can ask it to.

Sign in to the same Apple Account you subscribed with, then open Settings in Gambit and tap Restore Subscription. Apple hands the entitlement back and the archive unlocks.

You are never charged twice for restoring. If it doesn't take, check you are signed in to the right Apple Account — that's the usual cause — and if it still won't, get in touch.

Yes. Both plans are in the same subscription group, so switching is a plan change that Apple prorates rather than two overlapping subscriptions. There's a "Switch to Annual" (or Monthly) row in Gambit's Settings while you're subscribed.

Progress is stored on your device, so it does not follow you between phones on its own, and deleting the app deletes it. If your progress vanished on the same device without the app being reinstalled, that's a bug I want to hear about — tell me what happened just before, and roughly when.

Coins bought as a coin pack are a consumable purchase and are spent from your device's balance, so they behave the same way.

Refunds are handled by Apple, not by me. Go to reportaproblem.apple.com, sign in with your Apple Account, and choose the purchase. If something in the app went wrong, do tell me too, so I can fix it.