Rookie

Rookie is a chess app with a coach named Chichi. Stockfish works out the moves and threats, and a language model running locally through Ollama comments on them, stops you before a move that would drop a piece, and answers plain-English questions about the board. You can play Stockfish at eight levels, step through over 3,300 named openings, link a chess.com account to review your own games, and drill puzzles built from your mistakes.

It is for people learning chess who want feedback during the game rather than a report afterward, and who would rather not send their games to a cloud service.

Requires an Apple silicon Mac on macOS 14 or later, with about 10 GB of free space. Install Ollama first; on first launch Rookie offers to download a model of about 8 GB. The app is not notarized and not signed with a developer certificate, so the first open needs right-click, then Open, or Open Anyway in System Settings. The author tested it with gemma4:12b, and smaller models give a blunter coach. Games stay on the Mac, but a chess.com review or a Lichess opening lookup sends the data you asked for online.