Any chess position, on a board you can play.

There are two honest routes. Either you re-enter the position by hand — dragging pieces onto an empty board, or typing out a FEN string — or you let software read the picture. Hand entry is reliable and slow: a 25-piece middlegame takes a couple of minutes, and one pawn on the wrong square changes the whole assessment.

Recognition is faster, and it works well when the picture cooperates: the whole board in frame, shot square-on rather than from an angle, even light with no hard shadow across the squares, and pieces that don't overlap each other from where the camera is standing. A screenshot of a digital board is the easy case — flat, evenly lit, standard piece set. A wooden board photographed across a café table is the hard one.

Whatever reads the image, check it before you trust it. Kings and queens are easy to confuse in some sets, and a knight seen from behind can pass for a bishop. What matters is that you can correct a single square rather than start again.

ChessView reads the position from the camera or from any screenshot in your photo library, and anything it gets wrong you fix in the position editor — usually one piece, usually one tap. From there it is a live board you can play out.

A PGN file is plain text — a few tag headers in square brackets, then the moves — so iOS will show you the contents in Files or Quick Look without any help. What it will not do is put them on a board. You get a wall of 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6.

To read it as a game you need an app that registers the .pgn file type. Once one is installed, the file opens through the share sheet from wherever it happens to live: Files, an email attachment, a Messages thread, iCloud Drive, or a download in Safari. Tap the file, choose the app, and the game loads on a board.

Two things are worth checking before you settle on an app. Does it handle variations and comments? Annotated games and database exports are full of them, and a viewer that silently drops them is showing you a different game from the one you were sent. And does it keep the game afterwards, or forget it when you close the file?

ChessView registers PGN, so "open in" works from any of those places. Variations and annotations survive the import, and the game stays in the local library afterwards.

FEN describes one position. It is a single line with six fields: where the pieces stand, whose turn it is, which castling rights are still alive, the en-passant square if there is one, the halfmove clock for the fifty-move rule, and the move number. The starting position is rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQkq - 0 1.

PGN describes a whole game: tag headers for the event, the players, the date and the result, then the moves in standard algebraic notation, optionally carrying comments, annotation glyphs and side variations.

A useful way to hold the difference: FEN is a photograph, PGN is the film. A FEN says nothing about how the position arose, which is why it cannot show a threefold repetition. A PGN carries the whole history, but you have to play it forward to reach any particular position.

So: FEN to share a puzzle or a single position, PGN to share a game. ChessView reads and writes both, and will export either as a PNG diagram if what you actually need is a picture.

Not through Chess.com itself — the archive lives on their servers and wants a connection. But your finished games are public data, and Chess.com publishes them through an open API, one archive per month, with no key and no password involved.

That means any app can fetch a month of your games and keep them on the device. After that they are yours to replay on a plane, on a train, or anywhere else with no signal.

Worth knowing what this is and isn't: it is read-only public data. Nothing is written back to your Chess.com account, nothing asks for your password, and games that are still in progress won't be in the archive.

In ChessView you type your username, pick a month, and the games land in the local library — available with or without a connection from then on.