What it looks like
Straight from the phone, nothing staged.
iPhone · about six and up · nothing to read
No reading, no listening to instructions, no losing. A child who already knows what chess is learns the knight's jump and the rook's slide the way they learn a playground game: by watching it happen and feeling it in their hand.
The core loop, sketched simply
Touch a piece and every square it can reach glows. Nothing to read, nothing to guess — the board simply shows the shape of the move.
The piece slides a square at a time. Each step lands with a soft haptic tap, so counting is felt long before it can be said out loud. The game itself is almost silent — two sounds in the whole story, and nothing that nags.
Landing on another piece wakes it up — it startles, giggles, and bursts into stars. A wrong tap just makes a piece bump gently and spring back.
Every piece has an age of its own to travel through: the rook on a farm in the year 600, the bishop at a windmill, the queen at sea, the king on the railway, the knight on a gaslit street, the pawn on the open road. Thirty-five short puzzles, one idea at a time. An age you haven’t reached yet sits behind clouds until you get there — and does nothing until then, because a place you can’t enter shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
Straight from the phone, nothing staged.
Rooky collects no data of any kind. No accounts, no ads, no analytics, no third-party SDKs, no in-app purchases — and no network access at all, so there is nothing in the app with a way to send information anywhere. Read the full privacy policy.