Chess symbols in Unicode
Unicode has text representations of chess pieces. These allow to produce the symbols using plain text without the need of a graphics interface. The inclusion of the chess symbols enables the use of figurine algebraic notation, which replaces the letter that stands for a piece by its symbol, e.g. ♛f1 instead of Qf1. This also allows the play of chess games in text-only environments, such as the terminal.
Unicode blocks
Unicode 15.1 specifies a total of 110 spread across two blocks. 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. In Unicode 12.0, the Chess Symbols block was allocated for inclusion of extra chess piece representations. This includes fairy chess pieces, such as rotated pieces, neutral pieces, knighted pieces, equihoppers, as well as xiangqi pieces.In 2024, four shatranj pieces were provisionally assigned for a future version in the range U+1FA54–U+1FA57. This was completed in Unicode 17.0.
Emoji
In Unicode 11.0, an emojified representation of the character was added. As of Unicode 15.1, only this character has an emoji version. In 2024, a proposal was submitted to include emoji versions of the other standard chess symbols.| U+ | 265F |
| default presentation | text |
| base code point | ♟ |
| base+VS15 | |
| base+VS16 |