White and black chess pieces
Unicode has all twelve standard chess pieces in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, from ♔ (U+2654) to ♟︎ (U+265F). The "white" pieces ♔ ♕ ♖ ♗ ♘ ♙ are drawn as outlines, and the "black" pieces ♚ ♛ ♜ ♝ ♞ ♟︎ are filled. On a dark background the outline pieces can look like the darker side, so pick by look rather than by name if you are just decorating.
♟︎ is the only chess piece that is also an emoji (♟️, chess pawn), so it may show in color on phones. The neutral pieces 🨀 to 🨅 are used for chess variants and diagrams, and ⛀ ⛁ ⛂ ⛃ are draughts (checkers) pieces. These newer characters are missing from some fonts.
Piece letters and chess notation
In standard algebraic notation, each piece has a letter: K king, Q queen, R rook, B bishop and N knight (N, because K is already the king). Pawns get no letter, so a pawn move is written like e4. In FEN, the format used to record a position, uppercase letters are White pieces and lowercase letters are Black, so the starting position begins with rnbqkbnr.
Figurine algebraic notation swaps the letters for symbols, writing ♘f3 instead of Nf3, so readers can follow a game in any language. Other marks: + for check, # for checkmate, x for a capture, O-O and O-O-O for castling, ! and ? to judge a move, and 1–0, 0–1 or ½–½ for the result.
How to type chess symbols
There are no Alt codes for chess pieces. In Microsoft Word, type a code from 2654 (♔) to 265F (♟︎) and press Alt + X. In HTML, use ♔ to ♟. On a Mac, open the Character Viewer with Control + Command + Space and search "chess". On phones, the emoji keyboard only has ♟️, so copy the other pieces from this page.
You can sketch a position in a chat with ⬜︎ and ⬛︎ squares and pieces, but alignment varies between apps. For more game symbols, see the card suit symbols, and for crowns to match the kings and queens, the crown symbols.