I have been reading on various sites that you can now play chess in Facebook Messenger. Sweet! But how do you actually play chess in a text-based chat window?
Ah chess, the game of warfare and strategy! Did you know that chess originated in northern India in the 6th century AD and soon became so popular that it spread to Persia? When the Arabs then conquered Persia, the game was then adopted up by the Muslim world and subsequently, through the Moorish conquest of Spain, spread to Southern Europe. That means that we’re 1500 years into chess as a popular strategy game.
And now you can indeed play it through the ubiquitous Facebook Messenger program, though it’s a turn-by-turn system that’s not particularly pretty and can be a bit frustrating in its picky notational convention.
But let me show you with the beginning of a game I had with my friend Mary-Frances!
To start, every command to the chess engine must start with @fbchess, as shown here:
As you can see, just typing in @fbchess by itself is insufficient, you need to start the game by typing in @fbchess play, as I do in the middle of the above example.
It shows that a new game is starting, names the opponent, and reminds you what color you are (starting player is always white, of course).
Then it shows you the board:
Actually, it’s not too ugly at all and looks a lot like the kind of chess puzzle you’d see in a newspaper, doesn’t it? I actually think it’s utilizing a chess piece font, but that’s another story. You can see that it’s a simple grid, with letters across and numbers down.
Pieces are identified by their first letter, as shown:
- K = King
- Q = Queen
- B = Bishop
- R = Rook
- N = Knight (since “K” is already in use)
- P = Pawn
To specify a move, you simply denote which piece you want to move and the destination square for that piece. I’ll start by moving my pawn in D2 forward, as shown:
Now it’s time for Mary-Frances to take her turn, which she does with the exact same notation:
Hmm….
You can find out more about the fbchess engine by typing “help”. Well, @fbchess help:
I can’t handle the pressure, the game’s already too high stakes for me!
So I’ll resign:
And Mary-Frances wins. Ah man!
Anyway, that’s how you play chess in Facebook Messenger. And note that you can resume a game at any time with your friend too, as shown in the last few lines of the @fbchess help output.
Good luck!