Unicode Chess Symbols

If you are looking for the traditional chess pieces, you can find their emojis in this block with Miscellaneous-symbols. On the contrary, here we will talk about the pictograms for so-called fairy chess.

Long before Unicode appeared, and even before computers were introduced to the world, people started inventing chess puzzles. What is a chess puzzle? Basically, it's an imaginary (or pretty realistic) situation on a chessboard, where there is a certain position and a particular goal for playing this position out. For example, black must lose in three moves. Such an entertainment soon became very popular, and people kept developing and improving it. To make the game even merrier, new rules and figures would be introduced (for example, a grasshopper or a knightmare; I love the language pun of the latter). Such game variations were called fairy chess.

To make it more clear, I'll give you an example: if you watched The Big-Bang Theory, you probably remember an episode, where one of the main characters, Sheldon Cooper, was playing three-level chess, which basically looked like three chessboards, located one above the other. The challenging and uplifting game Sheldon found engrossing, was nothing else than a demonstration of what fairy chess may look like. If only he heard about cylinder chess! I guess he would be impressed.

Fairy chess was vastly popular: a lot of magazines and newspapers covered the information about it. To minimize the resources for creating ‘unorthodox’ figures, typewriters took the classic pieces and turned them over. That's why you can see a lot of ‘rotated’ symbols here: it's not your brain going crazy, it's a legitimate chess code.

Apart from the fairy chess, we included the pieces for Chinese chess called Xiangqi. Copy and paste them to get better chances of victory over your Chinese rival.