A chess learning kit
From first move to final tactic — delivered to your door.
Caissanaut bundles a coached chess app, a placement quiz that personalises your curriculum, and hand-picked boards, clocks and books into one box. The screen-to-board move, in a single evening.
One payment. No subscriptions. No freemium nudges.
Why a box
Chess is a hybrid product. The App Store doesn't ship it.
Every direct competitor is purely digital. Most learners get stuck because they grind puzzles in their sleep and still lose games over the board. Caissanaut bridges that gap — the same package that arrives at your door covers the move from screen to board.
A coached app, not a puzzle dump
Every missed move gets, in a human voice, the explanation you needed to see. Plain prose, plain English — no raw Stockfish output, no notation walls.
A placement quiz you don’t skip
A twelve-minute placement pins you on a personalised curriculum of tactics, endgame, openings, and spaced review. The lesson queue adapts when you plateau.
Physical gear you keep
A weighted tournament set for adults, a travel board for kids, a mating workbook and a practice clock. Hand-picked by someone who has shipped thousands of small parcels.
One payment, one path
No monthly drip. No freemium nudges. One box covers the screen-to-board move in a single evening, and the membership lives inside it for as long as you want to play.
Your placement
- 01
Six opening traps
Real lines, not puzzles.
- 02
Five endgame positions
From Lucena to K+Q vs K.
- 03
Twelve tactics by motif
Across all six motifs.
We route you to the right track on day one — and we reroute you silently when you plateau.
A placement quiz you won't skip
We pin you on a curriculum, not a ladder.
Most "personalised" tools just slap a rating number on you. The Caissanaut placement is a 12-minute cross-section of how you actually think — opening instincts, endgame technique, tactical pattern recognition — and it builds a queue tailored to where you’re stuck, not where everyone else is stuck.
Adapts downstream. If you miss two weeks of reviews, the queue rebalances quietly.
Routes around plateaus. Stuck for two weeks? The app routes a coaching replay.
What's inside the app
Four tracks. One coach voice. No notation walls.
Tap through the four tracks. Each one explains the why in plain English, the same way a coach would at the board — not the way a database dump would.
Tactics sprints
Spot the tactic in 8 seconds or less.
Daily 12-position sprints sorted by motif: pins, forks, discovered attacks, deflections. The coach explains every line in plain English — not Stockfish notation dumps.
Most improvers plateau here. We unstick them.
Motif-tagged
Every position carries a tactical theme so you learn the pattern, not just the puzzle.
Bite-sized
12 positions, 8 seconds each. Trains pattern recognition, the skill that actually wins games.
Coached
After each sprint, our in-house coach voice walks you through the missed moves in plain prose.
Try one now
Back-rank mate, in plain English.
A six-minute starter lesson: queen delivers mate while the king is hemmed in by its own pawns. Press play, then try the drill with a friend.
What's in the box
Hand-picked gear, by someone who has actually shipped it.
Three tiers at launch — Kids, Improver and Academy. Each is built around a single board, a single clock, a workbook, and the QR code that unlocks your curriculum for life.
Tournament-grade board set
Either a weighted Staunton set in boxwood (adult box) or a roll-up vinyl travel board + plastic pieces (kid box). Both USCF-tournament sizes.
Analog practice clock
A mechanical timer with lever and flag. The clack of the lever is part of the drill — you can’t get that from a phone.
Beginner mating workbook
A 120-page printed workbook on checkmate patterns: ladder, smothered, Anastasia’s, and Boden’s mate. Spiral-bound so it lays flat on the board.
Lifetime QR code
Each box ships with a unique unlock tied to the curriculum included — forever, on every device, no subscription trail.
Three tiers
Pick the lane you actually play in.
Every tier ships the same four things a box should have — board, clock, workbook, app code — sized to who you are. When in doubt, start with the placement quiz.
For parents
Kids
Parents of a chess-curious kid, ages six to eleven. The board fits small hands, the workbook starts from patterns a six-year-old can play, and the curriculum matches the pace of a school chess club.
In the box
Roll-up travel board
Vinyl board + plastic pieces, USCF-tournament sizes. Rolls into a tube that fits a backpack.
Beginner practice clock
A 1-minute-per-side clock, big enough for small hands to set without nudging a metal flag.
Kid mating workbook
A 120-page printed mate-pattern book. The drills start from positions a six-year-old can play — ladder, smothered, Anastasia.
App access code
A QR unlock bound to the kids curriculum: tactics, beginner endgames, no openings overwhelm.
For hobby improvers
Improver
Plateaued at 1100–1400 — solved the puzzles but still losing the games. The board is tournament-sized, the clock is mechanical, and the curriculum targets the leak that brought you here.
In the box
Weighted Staunton set
Boxwood + rosewood, weighted pieces, USCF-tournament sizing. A board you keep on the shelf for a decade.
Analog practice clock
A mechanical timer with lever and flag. The clack of the lever is part of the drill — you can’t get that from a phone.
Mating workbook
A 120-page printed book on checkmate patterns: ladder, smothered, Anastasia’s, and Boden’s mate.
Lifetime QR code
An unlock tied to the adult improver curriculum: tactics, endgames past mate-in-2, openings that don’t lose the centre.
For small academies
Academy
Small academies and clubs running cohort coursework. One box per student is a single line item, the app unlocks per seat, and the curriculum is the same one a real coach would set.
In the box
Classroom board bundle
A dozen USCF-sized vinyl boards, plastic pieces, and a roll-up demo board for the coach at the front.
Shared clock set
Four mechanical clocks, enough to run a simultaneous exhibition or a round-robin tournament on a Friday.
Curriculum workbooks
Twelve 120-page mating-pattern workbooks. One per student. Spiral-bound so they lay flat on the board.
App seat licence
Twelve lifetime seats, an admin dashboard, and a single curriculum aligned to the same workbook drills.
Where we fit
How Caissanaut stacks up next to the apps you already use.
We are not trying to be a different chess app. We are trying to be the chess app + the box + the coaching voice for one price, in one shipment.
The coaching voice
Plain English. Every move. No raw engine lines.
Stockfish output is the worst possible way to learn the game — it shows you a number, not a reason. Our in-house coaching voice explains what every variation is trying to do, in the same language a real coach would use across the board from you.
The voice is generated from a corpus we have built and curated in-house, not adapted from an LLM hiding its reasoning behind notation.
Example coaching line · move 14
“You missed the bishop because you’re scanning for the queen sacrifice. That’s the trap. In this kind of position the bishop is the real attacker — it pins the knight and wins the rook three moves later.”
Example coaching line · K+Q vs K
“Walk the king to the corner first, then push the pawn. If you push the pawn before you corral the king, the king just chases it back. Slow down.”
Questions
Honest answers from the founder.
Caissanaut is a new product from a small team. Any questions we haven't covered here? Reach out directly.
Pre-order
Mail us a line. We'll mail you back a box.
We are fulfilling the first run from a small warehouse. Drop us a note with your level and which tier you want — Kids, Improver or Academy — and we'll reply with a Stripe checkout link and an honest ship date.
Refund policy
If the box arrives in the wrong level — Adult vs Kid, or just wrong for where you actually are — we swap it free inside 30 days. Full refund within 14 days, no restocking fee, no email loop.
Coaching & hiring
We are hiring experienced club coaches (1800+ USCF / equivalent) to record short, plain-English explanations for our curriculum. If that’s you, send three sample lines to caissanaut@polsia.app.