About e4

e4 is a free chess coach on the web that explains every move in plain words and talks with you out loud.

What e4 is

e4 is a chess coach that lives in your browser. You play a friendly computer, and after every move the coach tells you, in plain words, what happened and why it matters. You can ask it questions by typing or by talking out loud, and it answers the same way. There is nothing to download and you can start without an account.

Who it is for

e4 is built for people who are new to chess or coming back to it: kids, parents, and adults who know how the pieces move but not what to do next. It never shows ratings or scores, because the goal is to understand the game, not to be judged by it.

How it works

The computer you play is Stockfish, the open-source chess engine, running on your own device. The coach uses large language models to turn engine lines into short explanations. Puzzles come from a library of about a million positions tagged by theme, so you can practise forks, pins and mates at your own level.

Who makes it

e4 is made by the angelwingscomms team. The source code is public at https://github.com/angelwingscomms/chess. Questions and fixes are welcome there.