Live at launch
Wonderland
Rooted in Lewis Carroll.
The looking-glass rebuilt as a place your reader can walk through. Tea that never ends. A Hatter stuck at 4:17. Choices that change what tomorrow looks like.
A family-built storybook world
A literary world
for kids and families
to inhabit together.
Chess and Stilz is an unfolding world of classic stories — Wonderland, Oz, the Odyssey, and more to come — written carefully, at register, for children nine and up and the parents and grandparents who read with them.
Read aloud. Read alone. Read together. Same world.
Real prose, not flattened.
Real sentences, real images, real weight. We trust the kid to climb.
A world that unfolds.
No menu of stories. The world brings what comes next — the way life does.
Earned depth.
Deeper stories aren’t paywalled. They open as the reader grows up inside the world — the way real reading does. A nine-year-old reading Wonderland isn’t reading the same story as a thirteen-year-old reading Wonderland. Same world, same characters, deeper water. The world meets the reader where she is, and grows with her.
What it is
A storybook world,
not a content library.
Most children’s reading apps are a grid of stories you scroll through. Chess and Stilz is a world your reader lives inside.
She doesn’t pick from a menu. She walks into Wonderland and the world brings her what comes next. She makes choices inside moments — those choices shape her relationships with the characters and what the world shows her tomorrow.
The characters carry weight. The Hatter is broken-hearted under his humor. The March Hare gives a stump speech about a haircut. Stilz tells a story he’s told before because she wants to hear it again. These aren’t cartoons. They’re people, all the way down.
A child should be able to grow up alongside a Chess and Stilz character the way readers have always grown up alongside book characters — and have her view of the world change because of it.
The cast so far
People, not cartoons.
Every character is rendered the same way: pen-and-ink crosshatching, parchment skin and fur, full-color outfits, chapbook chrome. The drawing register is one of the brand’s promises.
Tinkerer. Fixes one thing, breaks three. Calls every catastrophe a step in the right direction.
Stuck at 4:17. Torn, and waiting. A single bright thread in his hatband ticks the seconds forward.
Hears what the rest of us miss. Says what the rest of us won’t. Her brass bell rings when she speaks something the world hasn’t heard before — and somewhere far away, someone hears the same chime.
“Hayes” to the Hatter. Career politician. Lost his last election when his campaign mind fell asleep mid-speech. Still hasn’t conceded.
Always in a hurry to get the mail out. Don’t get in his way.
Once the sharpest campaign mind in Wonderland. Now asleep at the Ever-Tea Party — and not, she’d want you to know, by accident.
More characters arrive with each world. We’ll introduce them properly when they’re ready.
The worlds we’re publishing
One world at launch. More on the way.
Every world is grounded in its original source — the spirit, characters, and truths of the books that built them. We’re publishing them one at a time, the way an author would.
In the writers’ room
Grimm (Light)
Rooted in the Brothers Grimm.
The fairy tales as kids first meet them — wonder, mischief, courage, and a way home. Built for younger readers, with the same craft as the rest of the catalog.
On the horizon
Grimm (Dark)
The Brothers Grimm as they actually wrote them.
The originals, in their full complexity, for older readers ready for the real thing. Honest about its weight. Honest with parents about who it’s for.
On the horizon
Oz
Rooted in L. Frank Baum.
Baum’s full Oz — not just the yellow brick road, but everything past it. Fourteen books worth of country, characters, and weather.
More worlds in the works. Grimm Light is on the desk. Grimm Dark is in revisions. Oz is still arguing with us in the margins.
From the publishing house
What we publish, and what you’ll know.
Chess and Stilz is a publishing house, not a platform. We make editorial decisions — which worlds, which characters, what kind of bravery the stories ask of a reader — and we stand behind them.
Every world we publish is grounded in its original source. We honor the spirit, the characters, the tone, and the truths of the books that built these worlds — and then we let your reader walk inside them.
What you get as a parent is age guidance you can trust and content settings for each child on your account. The editorial work happens before stories reach the app, not after — so you don’t have to vet every chapter the way you would with a feed.
Be there at the start
Join the waitlist.
We’ll send occasional updates — sneak peeks of the world, news as we approach launch, and early-access invites for waitlist readers. Unsubscribe anytime.
Chess and Stilz is built by a family in the United States. No selling of email addresses, ever. Read our privacy approach.
A note from the founder
Why this exists.
Chess and Stilz is a family-founded project. My great-grandmother was the town librarian. My grandmother was my fourth-grade teacher — she wrote a play and I played Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. My mother and I have recommended books back and forth across decades. My nine-year-old daughter loved the first character drawing and chose nothing to change about it.
Five generations of women in this family teach each other how to read. My nine-year-old reads every page first. My mother — thirty years an educator and a reading specialist — tells us what to fix. Chess and Stilz is being built by three generations of one family, together — and it’s the first step that’s only possible now, in a moment where the tools have finally caught up to what reading with a child could be.
We can only launch once. If it takes a little longer to make it right, it takes a little longer.
— Tristy Lee, founder