A coach, not just a chess app

🔁 It learns from YOUR games — most apps don't

Connect your Chess.com or Lichess account (or just play here), and the Stockfish engine reviews every game automatically, in the background — you never have to ask — and finds the mistakes you make repeatedly — hanging pieces, missed forks, back-rank blindness — and reshapes your training around them. The "Fix my mistakes" trainer even replays the exact positions from your own games until you find the move you missed. Your own games become your best textbook.

🧠 The engine judges, the coach explains

Every verdict in ChessIt comes from Stockfish — the strongest chess engine on earth, running right on your device. But engines don't teach, so an AI coach turns each verdict into a plain-language lesson: what the move attacked, what it missed, and the habit that prevents it next time. The AI never judges chess itself, so the coaching is never wrong about the position.

♟ → ♛ A curriculum with a destination

No aimless grinding. Six phases named for the pieces carry you from your first move to 2400 — Pawn (stop losing pieces), Knight (tactics), Bishop (openings & endgames), Rook (strategy), Queen (deep calculation), King (master territory) — and above them the real title ladder takes over: Master, then Grandmaster. Each phase has lessons, graduation criteria, and a boss bot guarding the gate. Ratings follow the same FIDE rules used in international chess, so your number here means something real. Complete beginners start in Rules School and learn every rule by doing.

📋 A daily scoresheet, rebuilt for you every day

Each day the app writes you a short training plan — warm-up puzzles chosen by spaced repetition (what you missed comes back), your next lesson, a sparring game just above your level, a calculation drill. About twenty minutes. The plan adapts to your data, not a one-size-fits-all course.

📸 It coaches your real-world chess too

Playing on a physical board? Photograph it and ChessIt reads the position, shows the strongest plan, and explains the idea — then follows your whole game move by move. And the calculation gym trains the skill screens can't fake: seeing 5–10 moves ahead in your head, on a board that never moves.

⚔️ Friends make you stronger

Challenge friends with a 6-letter code — live or take-your-turn-whenever, with a notification when it's your move. Every friend game is rated like a real chess game and gets the full coach review afterward, so even bragging rights count as training.

🎈 And sometimes, just a game

Not every game should be homework. Just Play drops the plan, the prompts and the boss battles — pick an opponent, pick a colour, play. Afterwards your coach reviews it on its own and folds whatever it finds into tomorrow's puzzles. You can even set a game as friendly so it leaves your rating alone; the coaching still happens either way.

♞ Your coach has a name — you choose it

Every explanation comes from the same voice, and that voice is yours to name. Call it Rook, or Owl, or Professor Pawn, give it a face, and it stays that character across every lesson, puzzle and game review. Underneath it is still Stockfish doing the judging — the name changes who is talking, never what is true.

📖 80 chess words, explained with pictures

Chess has a private vocabulary and nobody hands you the dictionary. The free chess glossary explains all of it in plain English, with a real board diagram wherever a picture is faster than a sentence:

• Named openings — Italian Game, Ruy Lopez, Sicilian Defence, French Defence, and 10 more
• Named tactics — Fork, Royal fork, Pin, Skewer, and 15 more
• Named checkmate patterns — Fool’s Mate, Scholar’s Mate, Back-rank mate, Smothered mate, and 8 more
• Endgame terms — Opposition, Zugzwang, Triangulation, Lucena position, and 7 more
• Positional and strategic terms — Tempo, Initiative, Development, Prophylaxis, and 8 more
• Rules, results and ratings — Castling, En passant, Stalemate, Threefold repetition, and 8 more

🏆 Rivals — a weekly race with your friends

Claim a username and you join the rivalry board: everyone’s XP this week, streaks, ratings and puzzle counts, side by side. The race resets every Monday, so last place is never more than a few good days from first. Only your handle is shown — never your name or email — and staying off the board is as easy as not claiming a username.

🏛 Study the masters

Twenty annotated games from the greats — Morphy’s Opera Game, Fischer’s Game of the Century, Kasparov, Rubinstein — played guess-the-move style: you sit in the winner’s chair and try to find what they found. Past the authored curriculum, these become your daily study. There is also a free illustrated history of chess, from chaturanga to Gukesh.

🧸 Nine years old or fifty — same app, different clothes

Young learner mode (from Settings or sign-up) gives the youngest players bigger pieces, calmer screens, simpler words, and a “Read to me” button on every instruction, so someone still learning to read can follow along. Everyone else sees none of it. Underneath it is the same engine, the same curriculum and the same ratings — which run past 2600, because plenty of the people using this are adults who were already good before they arrived.

♚ Serious about strong players too

The placement test measures up to 2600, the puzzle library runs to 3000, sparring bots reach 3100, and ratings follow FIDE’s actual K-factor rules — including K=10 at 2400+. Link a Lichess or Chess.com account and your level here calibrates to your real one in one step. If you arrive titled, the app meets you where you are.

🛡 No chat, no strangers — by design, not by setting

This is the part we will not trade for a feature. There is no chat anywhere in ChessIt — not a setting, no code that could do it — no player directory or search, and no matchmaking pool. Knowing a username gets a stranger nowhere: the only route to a new opponent is an invite link one of you deliberately sent, and a coach can only follow a student who generated them a code in person. Every one of those is enforced in the database rules, not just hidden in the interface. It is what makes the app safe for a nine-year-old, and it is also why adults who are tired of trash talk and notifications from people they have never met tend to stay. The full safety page explains all of it, no account needed.

🛡 And what it doesn't do

No ads. No dark patterns. No pay-to-win. Streaks and XP exist to build a habit, never to manipulate one. It's the app a family would build for themselves — because that is exactly what it is.