Popular language learning app Duolingo is giving its bite-size lesson treatment to one of the oldest games in the world: chess.
Duolingo’s chess course will take users, who can range from complete novices to those with a solid understanding of how to play, through its gamified exercises to become better game players. The focus is mostly on attracting new players, including those who have felt chess is too difficult to learn or otherwise inaccessible.
“For the most part, a lot of chess products out there are usually built by an advanced user for more advanced-use cases—someone who already is familiar with chess and is kind of trying to elevate their abilities even further,” Edwin Bodge, Duolingo senior product manager, tells Fast Company. “So we are more targeting beginners and think that we’re addressing a part of the market that hasn’t previously been addressed.”
Users can learn how each piece moves, spot tactical patterns, and build a strategy. They can then apply those lessons in “mini matches,” which are just a few minutes long, to full games against its character Oscar. The bot will track how many matches the user has won and lost and can scale up or down the difficulty based on past performance.
“This is a game that’s been played for so long, and essentially Duolingo is now carrying the torch of [getting] more people interested in this game that has been around for so long and put our unique spin on it,” Bodge said.
Chess is the company’s first new subject since it branched beyond languages and introduced math and music classes in 2022 and 2023, respectively. The company launched in 2012 and has amassed more than 37 million daily active users as it brought language learning to the iPhone age and leaned heavily into attracting a young user base.
The company said that chess is the fastest course its developed to date thanks to advancements in AI. The product team pitched CEO Luis von Ahn on the course in late August and its first engineer started on the job in November.
Duolingo is testing chess with a limited number of learners starting Tuesday. It’ll roll out to all learners on iOS in English in the coming weeks, it said, with plans to eventually extend to additional operating systems and other languages in the coming months.
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