Rookahead is open: free chess game reviews, as many as you like

Rookahead is a chess game review you can use as much as you want, for free. Paste a game, or type your Chess.com or Lichess username and pick one of your recent games. Stockfish 19 goes through it move by move and gives each move a verdict, from Legendary down to Blunder. You get each side’s accuracy and the moments where the game turned, and you can step through it and try other moves with the engine running alongside.

There’s no daily limit and you don’t need an account. That’s possible because the engine runs on your own computer or phone, in the browser, and never on our servers. We’ve written more about how that works in Free game review, on your own device.

What you can do today

Review a game and you’ll see the verdict on every move, the coach’s note on why, and the key moments. A Clutch move () is the only move in a position: anything else loses your advantage, or leaves you much worse off than the best move would. A Legendary move is a sound sacrifice. If you want to know exactly where the lines are, How Rookahead grades a move goes through it with the Opera Game.

Your mistakes turn into puzzles. Every Mistake, Oversight and Blunder from the games you review comes back later as a position to solve, so you get another go at the move you missed. There are rated puzzles too, a daily puzzle that’s the same for everyone, and a sprint mode.

You can play the computer at eight levels. The lower levels make the kinds of mistakes people make at that rating rather than random ones, and every game you play lands in your games list, ready to review.

Any game or single move can be shared as a link, an image, a GIF, or a board you embed on your own site. Share links carry the game and its review inside the link itself, so we don’t store anything when you share.

On a phone, Rookahead works as an app: add it to your home screen from the browser and it opens full screen. There are colour themes and board themes in Settings, and an account is there if you want your games, reviews and puzzle rating on more than one device. You can skip it and still use everything above.

It’s new

Rookahead went online in October 2026, so expect rough edges. The verdicts are our own rules, written down in a public rulebook, and we’re still tuning them on real games. If a verdict looks wrong, press Disagree? on the move and tell us why. Those reports are how the rules get better, and when a rule changes, the reviews you’ve already saved are graded again with the new rules.

The whole thing is open source under the GPL, on GitHub.

What’s coming

Next up are an Android app on the Play Store and online play through your Lichess account. After that, coach notes that explain a mistake in plain words (“this hangs your knight on f6”), and more puzzle filters.

If you’d like to talk chess, ask why a move got its verdict, or tell us what to build next, come and say hello on Discord.