My grandfather taught me how the pieces move when I was a kid. That was pretty much it — because chess struck me as deathly boring. You push pieces around slowly, it looks like nothing is happening, and a single game outlasts your patience.

I came back to the board well past thirty.

Blame a TV series — The Queen's Gambit. After it I discovered chess all over again, this time as an adult: instead of dull piece-pushing I saw the most beautiful puzzle ever invented. And I was hooked for good.

I started putting my games on YouTube. That wasn't enough, so I also built topchess.org — a place to learn, solve puzzles and play with friends.

But one thought wouldn't leave me alone.

Why did I have to wait until thirty?

Chess didn't stick with me as a child because it was too hard. It simply looked less interesting than everything else I could be doing instead.

Today's kids face even tougher competition. A board with wooden pieces is up against colourful, moving, chiming worlds inside a phone. Let's be honest — the board loses that contest.

So I thought: what if chess came to the child where the child already is? Not as a lesson. As a game.

That's how Chessmon was born.

Chessmon opening scene: a character on a grassy meadow in front of castle gates
The opening scene: an open world, a castle in the distance, and not a single lecture on how the knight moves.

So what is Chessmon?

It's an open-world browser adventure inspired by Pokémon. You roam a 3D world, run into wild chessmons — creatures shaped like chess pieces — and every encounter turns into a chess puzzle on a timer.

Find the best move before time runs out and the chessmon is yours. Get it wrong three times and it escapes.

And that's the whole trick: the child isn't learning chess. The child is catching chessmons.

A battle against a chessmon: a chess puzzle on the board with a red rook-shaped creature beside it
A battle at the board. The clock is ticking, "Rookster" is waiting — and you're hunting for the best move.

What you'll find out there

  • Seven kinds of chessmon — the stronger it is, the harder the puzzle. The seventh stays safely hidden.
  • Two worlds — forests, a lake and a castle above; a cave and a hall of lava below.
  • The Sky Tower — stairs above the clouds, and higher still, floating tiles.
  • Four heroes — from 600 to 2000 Elo. With them it isn't a puzzle but a real game.
  • Chessmon Run — catch all seven as fast as you can and land on the leaderboard.
An underground cave: a giant glowing blue crystal and a river of lava
Beneath the world — the Underlord's hall.
The top of the Sky Tower: a character on a platform among floating rocks
The Sky Tower — some gaps you'll only clear at a run.

A minute of video says more than everything I've written here:

Why it's free

Chessmon costs nothing, needs no sign-up and no installing — it opens straight in the browser, on a computer or a phone.

Chess has given me a great deal; it just arrived very late. If even one child discovers it far earlier than I did because of this game, that is worth more than any revenue.

Try it yourself.

Play Chessmon →

If you have kids — show them, they might just take to it. What matters isn't whether they win the game, but whether, twenty minutes later, they ask how the knight moves.