Book of Mormon Chess: Play the Record, One Capture at a Time

Captain Moroni is your king. Abish is your queen. Your pawns are the Stripling Warriors, and across the board a Gadianton robber is waiting to take one of them.

Book of Mormon Chess is a free chess game where every piece is a person from the Book of Mormon. It plays like real chess. But when one piece captures another, the game pauses to tell you who they were, what they did and what happened to them, with the verses to read. Then it asks one question: how can we liken this to our own lives?

This guide shows every part of the game with screenshots: the setup, the 80 characters in realistic and brick art, the 12 pawn groups, the story panels, and Family Play on phones. It also looks at the doctrine behind the stories, what research says about stories and games, and a short peek at how it was built.

Contents

1. Why chess and the Book of Mormon fit together
2. How to play
3. Record Keeper stories and Liken the Scriptures
4. Every piece on the board
5. Brick style
6. All the ways to play
7. A family night with Book of Mormon Chess
8. By the numbers
9. What research says about stories and games
10. How it was built (and the code)
11. Questions people ask

Why chess and the Book of Mormon fit together

Chess is a game of two sides, hard choices and consequences. So is the Book of Mormon. Lehi taught his son Jacob that this is how life works:

“For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things.” (2 Nephi 2:11)

Lehi went on to teach that God gave us the power to “act for” ourselves, and that we are “free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death” (2 Nephi 2:16, 27). Every chess move is a small choice with a result. In this game, each of those choices opens a real story about people who made choices of their own, good and bad, and lived with the results.

The Book of Mormon is also full of strategy. Captain Moroni fortified cities, armed his people with breastplates and shields, and raised the title of liberty. Mormon wrote that “if all men had been, and were, and ever would be, like unto Moroni, behold, the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever” (Alma 48:17). It seemed natural to put him on a chessboard.

There is one more reason. Many families already have a chess set in the closet. This game turns a game you know into scripture study without anyone noticing it was a lesson.

How to play

1. Choose how you want to play

Open Book of Mormon Chess on a phone, tablet, laptop or TV. The setup screen asks a few questions:

• How to play: Record Keeper (stories after captures) or Quick Play (regular chess).
• Opponent: Computer, 2 players on one device, or Family Play on phones.
• You play: Blue (moves first) or Red.
• Level: Easy, Medium or Hard when you play the computer.
• Art style: Realistic or Brick.
• Characters: Let me choose or Pick at random.
• Pawns: one group for each side, such as the Stripling Warriors or the Gadianton Robbers.

2. Pick who plays each piece

With Let me choose, you tap a piece and pick a character for it: a king, a queen, two rooks, two bishops and two knights. Each character can be used once. The queen must be a woman, so your queen might be Sariah, Abish, the queen who believed Ammon, or the mother of the Stripling Warriors. Tap Read the story on any card before you choose, or tap Fill the rest at random when you are ready to play.

3. The base decides the move

Every character stands on a base. The base is the chess piece: a crown for the king, a tower for the rook, a horse for the knight. The character on top tells the story. That means Nephi can be a bishop in one game and a knight in the next, and the rules never change.

4. Play

Tap a piece to see where it can move, then tap the square. The game follows all the rules of chess, including castling, en passant and pawn promotion. Undo takes back a move, Flip turns the board around, and Figures hides the characters if you want to see plain pieces.

Record Keeper stories and Liken the Scriptures

Record Keeper is the heart of the game. Every time a piece is captured, the game pauses and opens two cards side by side:

• The captured character: who they were, their story, and What happened to them later in the record.
• The victor: the same for the character who made the capture.
• Scripture links under each card, so you can read the verses yourself.
• Liken the Scriptures: an “And thus we see” lesson and a question to talk about.

The name comes from Nephi, who wrote: “I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning” (1 Nephi 19:23). The “And thus we see” line follows Mormon’s habit of stopping a story to point out the lesson, as he did in Helaman 3:27–29: “Thus we may see that the Lord is merciful unto all who will, in the sincerity of their hearts, call upon his holy name.”

A few examples of the questions in the game:

• Nephi: “Nephi said, ‘I will go and do.’ What is one hard thing the Lord is asking you to do, and what is your first step?”
• Lehi: “Lehi wanted his whole family to taste the fruit of the tree. Who do you want to share the gospel’s joy with, and how could you start this week?”
• The Gadianton Robbers: “The Nephites offered the robbers a chance to repent. How can you give someone a second chance?”
• Gadianton: “Gadianton’s band did their evil in secret. Why is it important to be honest and open with our families instead of keeping bad secrets?”

The stories are honest about both sides. Red pieces are not cartoon villains. Their cards show where pride, secret combinations and flattery led, and several stories show how people who once fought the Nephites later changed. Zeezrom, Corianton, Alma the Younger and Lamoni’s father all play for Blue, because their stories end in repentance.

Turn stories on or off any time

Sometimes you just want to finish the game. Tap Stories on in the toolbar, or Turn stories off under any story, and the game keeps going as regular chess. Tap it again to bring the stories back. You never lose your place.

Every piece on the board

There are 80 named characters in the game, from Lehi in the first chapter of 1 Nephi to Moroni at the end of the record. 56 play for Blue and 24 play for Red. Ten of them are women, and eight are representative figures who stand for a group of people the record describes but does not name, such as a Nephite mother or an Anti-Nephi-Lehi convert.

The pawns

Pawns are groups, not single people. Each side chooses one of six groups to fill its eight pawns. Blue can field the Stripling Warriors, who “never had fought, yet they did not fear death” (Alma 56:47) and of whom “there was not one soul ... who did perish” (Alma 57:25), Captain Moroni’s soldiers, the united Nephites, the people of Alma, converted Lamanites or the Jaredite families. Red chooses from the Gadianton Robbers, the Amlicites, the king-men, the Amulonites, the Zoramites or Akish’s secret band.

Brick style

Younger players often love the second art style. Tap Brick and every character turns into a toy-brick figure, with the same colors, armor and props. The game is exactly the same; only the look changes. You can switch styles in the middle of a game.

All the ways to play

Family Play on phones

Family Play works like a family game show. Put the game on a TV or laptop, choose Family Play, pick 1 vs 1 or Teams, and tap Create game. A four-letter code and a QR code appear. Everyone scans the code with their phone camera, types a name and picks a team. The host can move people between teams, shuffle the teams, or deal new characters before starting.

In Teams, the game picks a teammate at random for each move and tries not to pick the same person twice in a row. The phone of the person whose turn it is says Your turn!, and everyone else sees who is moving. If someone puts their phone away, the game moves on to another teammate, and the host can tap Pick someone else at any time.

When a piece is captured, the story appears on the TV and on every phone at the same time. Read it together, talk about the question, and the host taps Keep playing when everyone is ready.

A family night with Book of Mormon Chess

Here is a simple 30-minute plan for family home evening, a youth activity or a seminary review day.

1. Open with a scripture (2 minutes). Read 1 Nephi 19:23 and ask what it means to “liken” the scriptures.
2. Set up teams (3 minutes). Put the game on the TV, choose Family Play and Teams, and have everyone scan the code. Mix ages on each team.
3. Play in Record Keeper (20 minutes). When a story appears, have the youngest reader read the first card and a parent read the second. Let the team that made the capture answer the Liken question first.
4. Close (5 minutes). Ask: Which character do you want to be more like this week? Write the answers down, and start next week’s game with those characters on the board.

Tips for different ages:

• Young children: play 2 players with a parent, use Brick style, and let them choose the characters.
• Teens: Family Play Teams on phones, Hard mode against the computer, or a family tournament over several weeks.
• Classes: project the host screen and split the class into Blue and Red. No accounts or student emails are needed.
• Short on time: start in Record Keeper and switch to Quick Play halfway through to finish the game.

Play Book of Mormon Chess free

By the numbers

Possible starting lineups are practically endless. With 8 possible queens and 55 other characters for the remaining seven pieces, Blue alone has more than 8 trillion possible lineups, so no two family nights have to look the same.

What research says about stories and games

We designed the game around stories for a reason. Researchers who combined the results of dozens of studies found that people understand and remember stories better than plain explanations:

• A 2021 meta-analysis in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review pooled 37 articles and more than 33,000 participants. Stories were recalled and understood better than expository (explanatory) texts, with an overall effect of about half a standard deviation. The advantage tended to be larger for memory than for comprehension, and for readers 16 and younger, though those differences were not statistically significant.
• That is why each capture tells a story with people, choices and an ending, instead of a list of facts.

What about chess itself? The honest answer is that chess is good fun, but not a magic brain booster:

• A 2016 meta-analysis of 24 studies with 5,221 students found a modest positive effect of chess instruction on academic and thinking skills (about a third of a standard deviation, a bit larger for math).
• The same researchers cautioned that almost none of those studies compared chess with another fun activity, and later reported that effects were minimal or null in the best-designed studies.

So we don’t promise smarter kids. We do think the time together matters. In a 2025 study in Family Relations, children, parents and grandparents described board games as a way to spend time together and pass on values and life experiences. 24 of the 30 people interviewed talked about time together. That is exactly what Book of Mormon Chess is for.

The Church’s 2028 Come, Follow Me study guide for the Book of Mormon puts it simply: “The home is the ideal place to learn the gospel.” A game night can be part of that.

Small and simple things

Alma told his son Helaman that “by small and simple things are great things brought to pass” (Alma 37:6). A chess game is a small thing. A two-minute story and one honest question after a capture is a simple thing. Over many family nights, children who know Abinadi, Abish, Teancum and Samuel the Lamanite by name will read the Book of Mormon differently.

Our store is named for another verse: “I give unto men weakness that they may be humble … then will I make weak things become strong unto them” (Ether 12:27). Many of the strongest pieces in this game started out weak: a young Nephi, a Lamanite servant named Abish, 2,000 young sons who had never fought. That is a lesson worth playing over and over.

How it was built (and the code)

Book of Mormon Chess runs entirely in the web browser. The chess rules come from chess.js, a well-known open-source library, and the QR codes come from the open-source qrcode-generator library. Everything else was written for this game:

• about 1,100 lines of JavaScript for the board, the lineups, the stories, the computer opponent and Family Play
• about 180 lines of CSS and 240 lines of HTML for phones, laptops and TVs
• about 430 lines of SQL for the live Family Play rooms, which keep only nicknames and are deleted within a few hours
• a character and story library of about 3,850 lines, with 184 character images, checked verse by verse against the Book of Mormon

The hardest part was not the chess. It was the stories: keeping each one short enough to read during a game, accurate to the verses, and kind to younger players, and writing a question for each one that a family could actually talk about.

// 1. Every capture becomes a story. When a move takes a piece,
//    the game opens both characters: the one captured and the victor.
function storyFor(info) {
  if (state.play !== 'story') return;          // Quick Play skips stories
  const g = state.game, { mv, uid, capUid } = info;
  if (g.isCheckmate()) {
    const kSq = g.board().flat()
      .find((p) => p && p.type === 'k' && p.color === g.turn()).square;
    openStory(uid, mv.piece, state.ids[kSq], 'k', 'mate');
  } else if (capUid) {
    openStory(uid, mv.promotion || mv.piece, capUid, mv.captured, 'capture');
  }
}

// 2. Lineup rule: a character plays for one side, and the queen is a woman.
export function allowed(id, slot, side) {
  const c = CHARACTERS[id];
  if (!c || c.side !== side) return false;
  if (slot === 'Q' && !c.female) return false;
  return true;
}

-- 3. Family Play teams: the server picks who moves next, at random,
--    from teammates who are online, and avoids repeating the last mover.
select pid into m from bc_players
 where code = p_code and team = side and not kicked
   and last_seen > now() - interval '25 seconds'
 order by (pid = prev), random()
 limit 1;

Questions people ask

Is Book of Mormon Chess free?

Yes. It is free to play in a web browser, with no app, no account and no login.

Do I need to know how to play chess?

It helps, but the game only lets you make legal moves and highlights where a piece can go. Start on Easy against the computer, or play 2 players on one device with someone who knows the rules.

Who are the pieces?

80 Book of Mormon characters: 56 on the Blue team and 24 on the Red team. Twelve groups, such as the Stripling Warriors and the Gadianton Robbers, fill the pawns. You choose who plays each piece, or let the game deal them at random.

What is the difference between Record Keeper and Quick Play?

Record Keeper pauses after every capture to tell the stories of both characters, with scripture links and a Liken the Scriptures question. Quick Play is regular chess with the same characters and no pauses. You can turn stories on or off at any time without ending the game.

How do we play as a family on phones?

Open the game on a TV or laptop, choose Family Play, then 1 vs 1 or Teams, and tap Create game. Everyone scans the QR code or types the four-letter code. In Teams, the game picks a teammate at random to make each move.

Is it accurate to the scriptures?

Each story was written from the Book of Mormon and links to the verses it comes from, 292 scripture links in all. A few figures, like a Nephite mother or a Lamanite daughter, represent groups of people rather than one named person. The art is an artist's imagining.

Is this an official Church game?

No. Weak Things made it independently. It is not an official product of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

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Keep reading and playing

• Book of Mormon Games: Verse Quest, Name That Nephite, Captain Moroni Strategy and more
• All Weak Things games for families, seminary and Primary
• Book of Mormon Games for Primary and Youth
• Family Home Evening Games Teens Will Actually Play
• A Daily Scripture Puzzle Like Wordle: Meet Verse Quest
• Seminary Showdown: a free seminary review game

Book of Mormon Chess is an independent game made by Weak Things, a small family business. It is not an official product of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Scripture quotations are from the Book of Mormon at ChurchofJesusChrist.org. Character art is an artist’s imagining. Found a mistake? Tell us.