Chess symbols in Unicode

This also allows the play of chess games in text-only environments, such as the terminal.

The standard set of chess pieces—king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, or pawn, with white and black variants—were included in the block Miscellaneous Symbols.

[1] In 2024, four shatranj pieces have been provisionally assigned for a future version in the range U+1FA54–U+1FA57.

[2][3] In Unicode 11.0, an emojified representation of the character U+265F ♟ BLACK CHESS PAWN was added.

In 2024, a proposal was submitted to include emoji versions of the other standard chess symbols.

Refer to caption
Font depictions of Unicode chess symbols (in the same order as the table): DejaVu Sans , FreeSerif , Quivira, Pecita.
A screenshot of the GNU Chess program in graphic mode showing the chessboard with Unicode characters.
GNU Chess using Unicode chess characters to display a chess board in the terminal.