Chess
in a link.
Make a move. Copy the link. Send it. Your friend opens the link, sees your board, and plays back. The entire game lives inside the URL — no apps, no accounts, nothing to install.
For chess between two people who already text each other.
www.chextmate.com/play/ ← play a move → CopiedEach move on the board appends to this URL. Click the link to copy it once you've made a move — that's the link you'd send to your opponent.
Three taps. One link. A whole game.
chextmate is a single-file chess app that doesn't need a server. Everything required to continue the game — position, last move, whose turn — is encoded right there in the link you share.
Make your move
Tap a piece, tap where it should go. The board enforces legal moves, handles promotions, calls out check.
Copy the link
The URL updates after every move. One tap puts the entire game on your clipboard, ready to share.
Send it anywhere
iMessage, email, Discord, a sticky note in Notion. They open it and see the exact board you saw.
Most chess apps need accounts, push notifications,
and a server somewhere keeping score.
chextmate doesn't.
Built around one strange idea.
No rush, no clock
Play a move over coffee. Reply tomorrow. The game waits in the link until someone opens it.
Nothing to sign up for
No email, no password, no profile. There's no database to leak because there's no database at all.
Works on anything with a browser
Phone, laptop, the weird tablet in your kitchen. It's one HTML file behind a chess engine.
The obvious stuff, answered.
What if I lose the link?
Save it as a bookmark, or just leave it in the iMessage thread you're sending it through. The link is the game — as long as it exists somewhere, the position is recoverable.
Can I have more than one game going at once?
Yes. Each game is a different URL. Keep them in separate threads — one with your brother, one with your friend at work, one with yourself for practice.
Is my game private?
There's no account, no database, no server-side logs of moves. The only people who see your game are the people you send the link to. (chextmate runs on a tiny Node server that just serves the HTML — it never sees your moves.)
Does my opponent need to sign up?
No. They open the link in any browser, see the board, tap their move, copy the new link, send it back. They don't need to know what chextmate is.
What about cheating with an engine?
Realistically, you can't stop it — there's no clock, no enforcement layer. chextmate is for friendly correspondence chess with people you trust, not rated play.
Does the URL really hold the whole game?
Yes. Moves are joined with dots: ?g=d2d4.e7e6.e2e4… An average 40-move game is ~200 characters — well under any URL length limit.
