About CorrLinks Chess

Our Story

CorrLinks Chess was born from a mentoring relationship through Partakers, a nonprofit that supports incarcerated individuals pursuing college degrees. As a volunteer mentor through Tufts University, I wanted a way to stay connected with my mentee beyond our regular correspondence — and what better way than a game of chess?

The challenge: CorrLinks, the Bureau of Prisons' electronic messaging system, only supports plain text. No images, no attachments, no links. So I built this tool to generate Unicode chess boards and manage games entirely through copy-paste messages, working within the system's 13,000-character limit.

The goal is to make this available to anyone who wants to play chess with someone on the inside. Connection matters, and sometimes a game is the best way to maintain it.

What Is It?

CorrLinks Chess is a web app that manages correspondence chess games played over CorrLinks. It validates moves, tracks game state, detects message drift, and provides Stockfish-powered analysis — all generating plain-text messages you can paste into CorrLinks.

Features

Move Validation

Full chess rules enforcement including castling, en passant, and promotion

Unicode Board

Plain-text board visualization that works in any email system

Drift Detection

Detects when game state diverges between players' messages

Stockfish Analysis

Engine-powered analysis with best-line suggestions

Multiple Games

Manage several concurrent games with different opponents

Copy-Paste Workflow

Optimized for the CorrLinks message composition workflow

How to Play

Sign in and create a new game or paste an incoming message from your opponent to continue an existing one.
Make your move on the interactive board. The app validates it against full chess rules.
Click generate to produce a formatted plain-text message containing the board, move history, and game metadata.
Copy the generated message and paste it into a new CorrLinks message to your opponent.
When your opponent replies with their move, paste their message back into the app to continue.

Support

CorrLinks Chess is free to use. If you find it valuable, consider supporting the organizations that make this kind of connection possible:

Partakers — supports incarcerated individuals pursuing college degrees through mentoring and scholarships. partakers.org
Tufts Prisoner Re-Entry Program — connects Tufts volunteers with incarcerated mentees.

If you'd like to support the development and hosting of this tool directly, reach out at [email protected].

CorrLinks Chess is a personal project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, ViaPath Technologies, Partakers, or Tufts University.