As a bonus Winterfest 2024 surprise gift, we’re releasing a Chess template to celebrate the World Chess Championship. Congratulations to Gukesh Dommaraju on becoming the youngest-ever world champion at 18 years old!

Plain text is malleable. You can stretch it, pull it into any shape. It’s possible to encode anything in plain text—including a game of chess. Sure, you won’t see the concentration on a player’s face, or how they sit in their chair. Nor the tension when the player agonizes over a move.

But the moves themselves can be simply documented, and that ability has always held a particular fascination for us plain text aficionados. It is possible to relive legendary games from grand masters long since passed—thanks to simple text records. This fascination of describing chess games in plain text is why we created this template.

Algebraic notation

The recording method has changed over the years, and we now have an easy way to do it. If you’ve ever played Battleship before, you’ll understand the concept. The chessboard is assigned rows and columns or, as per the nomenclature, ranks and files. 1-8 for ranks, a-h for files.

Now we have a Cartesian grid, it is just a matter of assigning piece names:

  • N = Knight
  • B = Bishop
  • R = Rook
  • Q = Queen
  • K = King

And so we can simply write “Bb5” to indicate a move where a bishop moved to the square on the fifth rank of the b file.

The observant among you would gather two points straight away: Where are the pawns? and How does N accord with the Knight?

To both questions, the answer is status. Knights are below Kings and since K was already taken, the phonetic N must suffice. Pawns are so disposable and constrained in their movement that they don’t even grant a prefix. “e4” always means a movement of a pawn to the coordinate e4.

Okay, but where is my gift?

  • Get the Chess template for iA Writer

Use the template to play out chess games in iA Writer. It could even be your own game. Chess.com, lichess.org, and every other legitimate chess platform will let you download a record of your game in .pgn (portable game notation) format. That’s the key. This template works exclusively with .pgn files, so we can’t be held liable when a monster eats your hat if you load up a .txt with it.

When you load up a .pgn file, switch to Preview and choose the Chess template. You’ll see a chessboard that lets you click/tap through the whole game. If you have a game that includes commentary, it will appear on each move where present.

PDF printout of a chess game

Switch to PDF view and you’ll get a nicely formatted print-out of the game.

Given the recent 2024 World Championship, we’ve included .pgn files with full Grandmaster commentary of the series. We’ve also bundled in a collection of classic Grandmaster games with GM commentary.

Did we mention, that the chess template is an invitation to you: Try and play a bit with the templates. It is a showcase of what is possible. And it is little pre-taste of more advanced writing templates that we are working on right now.

Let us know what you think!

We plan to bring future updates to this new template and we’d love to know how you find using it. Please drop us a line at [email protected] with your thoughts.

Oh, and we still have two additional surprises coming in iA Winterfest 2024 so head over there to sign for the beta waitlist and get hints of what else is waiting under the tree.

  • Get the Chess template for iA Writer