A free chess app for kids

It runs in a browser, there is nothing to install and nothing to buy, and a child can start playing without typing an email address. This page is the parent's version: what it is, what it asks for, what it deliberately does not have, and one claim we are not going to make.

What it is

Reflex Chess is a puzzle trainer rather than a place to play games. A child is shown a real position from a real game with something to win in it, and finds the move. There are 87 skills and 10,440 positions, grouped into short lessons, and it runs on a phone, a tablet, a laptop or a school Chromebook because it is a web page.

What it does not have

• No adverts. There is no ad network on this site and no advert of any kind on any screen. The security policy the site is served under does not permit a script from an ad host to load at all, so this is not a promise we could break by accident.
• Nothing to buy. No subscription, no premium tier, no in-app purchase, no unlockable pack. There is nowhere on the site to enter a card number.
• No chat, no messages, no other players. There is no chat box, no comment field, no friend list, no leaderboard and no way to play against another person. A child cannot be contacted through this app because there is no mechanism through which anyone could contact them.
• No account needed to start. The first section and both practice modes open with no sign-in and no email address.
• It works offline. Once a page has loaded it stays available with the aeroplane mode on, which also means the app is usable on a device you have deliberately taken off the network.

What you get without an account

The first section is 3 skills (Getting Started, Mate in One, Free Pieces), which is 360 positions, plus Reflex Rush, a timed mode with sixteen different sets, plus a practice mix. All of it opens with no sign-in.

Sections after that ask for an account, and the reason printed on that screen is the true one rather than a sales one: progress lives in the browser, and clearing a browser or moving to a new phone deletes it. A forty day streak lost to a cache clear is a betrayal rather than a bug, so the account exists to hold it. There is no paid tier behind the account and nothing is unlocked by paying, because there is nothing to pay for.

Open the trainer · Start with mate in one · Try Reflex Rush

The bit most sites leave out

Two third-party services are involved, and a page telling you how private something is should name them rather than let you assume there are none.

• Vercel's own web analytics runs on the app page and counts visits and page speed. It is the hosting provider's built-in measurement, not an advertising product.
• Clerk runs the optional sign-in. Its script loads on the app page, it sends its own usage telemetry, and it uses Cloudflare's bot check on the sign-in form itself. Progress saved to an account is stored on our own database and is only ever readable by that account: there is no endpoint on this site that returns one person's data to another.

That is the complete list, and it is enforceable rather than a promise. The security policy the site is served under names the hosts a browser is allowed to load anything from, and it is those two and no others, so a tracker or an advert added by accident simply would not run. The written pages in this section and the worksheet PDFs load nothing external at all.

If your school or household blocks third-party scripts entirely, the worksheets are the answer. They are static PDFs, they need no account, no login and no connection once printed.

The claim we are not going to make

Every other page you have read this week probably told you that chess raises test scores, builds concentration or makes children better at maths. We are not going to, because the research on transfer from chess to school performance is genuinely disputed, and a site that quotes it confidently while asking for your child's attention has told you something about itself.

What is true and smaller: chess is a game with a right answer, and a child who enjoys it spends a lot of time looking for one before acting. Whether that carries over to anything else is not something we can promise you, so we do not.

If you would rather it happened on paper

Reasonable, and common. There are 36 printable worksheets covering the same 12 patterns, 432 positions with a full answer key, free to print and copy. No device involved and no account to create.

Easy puzzles to try now · The printable worksheets · Teaching chess to kids · Everything for kids

Questions