Play Chess for Free with Friends & Family

A chess game that fits both your lives

The hard part of playing chess with a friend was never the chess - it was the scheduling. Different cities, different time zones, different bedtimes once children arrive. Daily correspondence chess quietly solves all of it: you move when you can, they move when they can, and the game carries on in the background of both your lives for days or weeks.

Plenty of the longest-running games on this site are between old friends, siblings, or a parent and a grown-up child on opposite sides of the world. The game becomes a standing connection - a reason to check in, needle each other about a blunder, and start the rematch the moment one game ends.

Setting up a game takes a minute

You both create free accounts, then one of you challenges the other by username with whatever pace suits you - a move a day is the classic, but faster and slower are there too. Each game has its own chat alongside the board, so the conversation travels with the moves. Play from any browser or the free mobile app; one of you can be on an iPhone and the other on a twenty-year-old desktop and neither will know the difference.

Mismatched abilities do not matter much at this pace either. A beginner gets time to think without a clock ticking at them, and unrated games let you play purely for fun while they find their feet. Point a complete newcomer at the getting started guide and they can be making legal moves the same day.

When your friends will not play

It happens - not everyone can be talked into chess. The community here has been playing daily chess together since 2001, and open invites make it easy to find opponents at your level and your pace. A good number of the friendships on this site started as a game between strangers and have outlasted the players' jobs, houses and haircuts. Clubs and clans give you a team to belong to when you want more than one-on-one games.

Frequently Asked Questions