Reading the Battle Record
Under every board sits the move strip, the running record of the game. In standard chess it would read 1. e4 Nc6 2. Bb5 a6 3. Bxc6 and that would be the whole story. In ChessVS the notation says more, because a capture isn't always what it claims to be: Bxc6 might mean the Bishop took the Knight, or that both pieces are still standing with their Shields at zero.
So ChessVS notation reads as chess first, ChessVS second: the classic marks you know (+ for check, # for checkmate) are unchanged, and a small colored battle glyph rides after any move where a clash resolved.
The six battle results
Every capture attempt resolves into one of six results — and each has its mark:
| Glyph | Result | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| ✕ | Captured | The defender falls; the attacker takes the square. The classic kill. |
| ↩ | Reverse Captured | The counter lands first — the attacker dies and the defender holds. |
| ×× | Mutual Capture | Both pieces fall. The square is left empty. |
| ⇋ | Traded Probe | No kill — the move reverts, but every wound sticks. |
| ◐ | Mutual Wound | Both hit 0 SHLD and both survive. Barely. |
| ✕ | Classic Capture | The defender was already at 0 SHLD, so it cannot strike back: the attacker captures it and takes no counter. The strip gives it the same ✕ as a clean capture. |
A worked line: 3. Bxc6◐ means the Bishop's capture attempt on c6 ended as a Mutual Wound. The Bishop's 2 ATK met the Knight's 2 SHLD, and the Knight's 3 ATK met the Bishop's 3 SHLD, so each knocked the other to exactly zero and neither fell. Check the board and you'll find the Bishop back on b5 and the Knight still on c6, both at 0 SHLD with their ATK spent down to the floor of 1. Then 3... axb5✕ is a Classic Capture: the Bishop is already at 0 SHLD, so it cannot strike back, and the pawn takes it untouched.
The yellow half-circle after Bxc6 tells you the Bishop and the Knight both survived a Mutual Wound, and the green X after axb5 marks the pawn's Classic Capture of the wounded Bishop.
Game-state marks
The strip also closes every game honestly:
| Mark | Meaning |
|---|---|
+ | Check — unchanged from standard chess. |
| # | Checkmate — the classic mark, shown in gold. |
| ⊘ | Stalemate — chess never had a symbol for it; ChessVS does. |
| ½ | Draw. |
| ⚐ | Resignation. |
When your opponent resigns, the strip closes with a gray flag so you can see at a glance how the game ended.
Stat and ability marks
- ⚔ is ATK and 🛡 is SHLD wherever stats are written (cards, previews, stories) — you'll never see them as move suffixes.
- ⌖ marks a Pinpoint strike — the Bishop's remote drain, written like
⌖e5!when the target falls. - » marks a shove. When Defiant Step or Battering Ram pushes a piece instead of taking it, the record writes all three squares:
e4-d5»d6means the pawn went from e4 to d5 and the piece that stood on d5 was pushed to d6. The-says nothing was taken; the»is the same chevron the board draws on the square the piece was pushed to. A push off the edge of the board, or a push that was blocked, is written as an ordinary capture, because on those moves material really did change.
That's the whole language. A ChessVS scoresheet stays readable to any chess player — and tells a battle story no standard scoresheet can.