Every named move carries a story

Chessography is a chessboard with a book beside it. Play a move, and the app resolves the most specific named thing on the board — an opening line, a pawn structure, an endgame, a famous mate — and opens its story: the person it honours, where the name came from, and how it earned its place in the game.

What gets recognized

• Openings — every position is checked against 3,732 named lines from the lichess opening atlas. Recognition is by position, not move order, so transpositions resolve correctly, and the naming lineage shows the name narrowing move by move (King's Pawn Game → Ruy Lopez → Morphy Defense → Marshall Attack).
• Pawn structures — the Isolated Queen's Pawn, hanging pawns, the Carlsbad, the Maróczy Bind, the Hedgehog, the Stonewall and the French chain, detected from the board itself.
• Endgames — the Lucena and Philidor positions, the Opposition, the wrong rook's pawn, the bishop-and-knight mate.
• Named mates & tactics — the smothered mate, back-rank mate, Anastasia's, Arabian, Boden's and epaulette mates, and the Greek Gift sacrifice, recognized the moment they land.

How to use it

• Play both sides, or face Stockfish at four strengths; 💡 Advice explains the best move in words and tells the story of the line it enters.
• Step through any game with the arrow keys or on-screen controls; hover a lineage entry to see its position.
• When a game ends, the post-game chronicle names the ending, maps the named territory the game crossed, and can annotate the finale with the classic ?? / ? / ?! glyphs.
• Share copies a link that carries the whole game — no accounts, nothing stored.
• The opening trainer turns every storied line into a spaced-repetition card you recite on the board; the chronicle fetches your own recent lichess or chess.com games and resolves each against the atlas.

Credits

Opening names from the lichess chess-openings dataset (CC0). Engine: Stockfish 18 lite, running entirely in your browser. Built with chess.js, react-chessboard and React. All story text written for this site.