I’ve never asked, but I’m sure my sister still hasn’t forgiven me for a gift I bought for her husband about seven years ago, when the pair of them moved back here, to Connecticut, with their baby daughter.

 

They’d been living in Aspen, Colorado, where my sister – a hotel executive – had been working and where little Baylor, my niece, was born.

 

Like me, Bill likes his simple pleasures, and one of those pleasures for both of us is chess. Strategic, portable and impossible for mere mortals to master, chess is a game that grows with its players.

 

Also like me, Bill is not his marriage’s bread-winner, and as a stay-at-home dad – one of this world’s most honorable and difficult professions – he found pockets of time where he needed to do something other than shake a bottle of formula, change diapers and nap when Baylor went down.

 

So I got him a little pocket chess game that offered loads of levels of difficulty, peeks into classic chess games and lessons in strategy. Tragically for Bill, the game also beeped every time a player made a move – and Bill, who isn’t tech-savvy – never figured out how to mute the device’s volume.

 

But before my sister finally got fed up and the pocket chess game mysteriously disappeared, Bill spent hours on it. And I had my own, and I spent hours on mine.

 

Apple’s (News - Alert) iPhone and iPod Touch are about as slim as that battery-powered device, and naturally, the iTunes App Store offers loads of versions of the ancient game.

 

One of those is “tChess Lite” from Tom Kerrigan.

 

Designed to accommodate the casual player, the game features a nice, clean user interface and – this is a plus – allows users to listen to music while they’re playing. There’s another version from Kerrigan, the tChess Pro app, which includes features for real chess enthusiasts.

 

But give me the lite version (I wish I said that more often).

 

It features one or two-player games and requires no network connection. The game highlights legal moves, allows players to take moves back, includes a built-in chess clock – for those of us who have forked over cash to the gentlemen of Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, this is a nice feature – and saves games automatically.

 

Now, there are games that feature interactive leagues, where iPod Touch and iPhone (News - Alert) users can play live chess against someone else through cyber-space. But those games generally are for more expensive than tChess Lite.

 

At 99 cents, the game also includes a “hint” button, five difficulty levels and in-game help, including information about castling and what the French call “en passant,” or “in passing,” which is another way of saying, “That’s right my pawn can move that way. That just happened.”

 

I just played on level three and won my game – with a couple of mulligans – in 37 moves, or about six minutes. Not a bad way to break up the day.

 

My niece, Baylor, will turn eight in November, and her little sister, Ava, is nearly five. Bill and Rachel, my sister, recently moved from San Diego – where she was running one hotel – to Boston, where she’s running another one.

 

These days, Bill and I play chess through Facebook (News - Alert), which is just fine, though it can take days on end to get through a game.

 

God forgive me, but I’m thinking of getting some of the relatives together to get Bill an iPhone or iPod Touch for his birthday this summer. Note to self: Teach him how to mute the thing.