Duolingo Chess

Duolingo Chess is a free chess course built into the Duolingo app, launched in June 2025. It teaches chess from absolute beginner to intermediate level (roughly 1500 Elo) through the same bite-sized, gamified format that made Duolingo the world's most popular language learning app. Oscar, your sarcastic AI chess coach, guides you through puzzles, mini matches, and full games.

The course is 75 percent puzzle-based, with the rest split between mini matches (90-second tactical challenges with limited pieces) and full matches against Oscar. It supports player-versus-player mode on iOS and Android, letting you challenge other learners in real time. The course is available in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese.

With approximately 7 million daily active users in less than a year, Duolingo Chess has become the fastest-growing course on the platform. Duolingo (NASDAQ: DUOL) believes it may already be the second-largest chess platform in the world by daily users. The course was reportedly built using large language models, with Duolingo's team "vibe coding" the initial curriculum. Duolingo has also collaborated with chess creators including Zachary Saine (TheChessNerd) and Charlize van Zyl on Instagram Reels to promote the chess course.

Before building its own chess product, Duolingo partnered with Chess.com in late 2023 for a cross-promotion where Duolingo characters became playable bots on Chess.com. The two companies shared a connection through General Atlantic, a growth equity firm that invested in both. That partnership ended when Duolingo launched its own chess course. Whether this was planned market segmentation, a competitive pivot, or simply organic evolution remains an open question.