The only game that fits on a card

A board diagram with the pieces where they stood after ten moves, and underneath, in a monospaced column, the moves that got them there.

That's a complete record of a game. You could replay it from the shirt.

Why is that unusual?

Because no other sport can be written down in full.

A football match produces a score and some statistics. A tennis match produces a set of numbers. Neither reconstructs the event. Chess notation reconstructs it entirely — every decision, in order, unambiguously, in a few dozen characters.

Which means a chess shirt can carry the actual game rather than a symbol of the sport. Nothing else in this section can do that.

Which game should it be?

Yours, and it doesn't have to be a good one.

A famous game is somebody else's — and more importantly, it's the version a thousand people already have. The interesting one is a game the wearer played: the club championship, the one they won against somebody much better, the one where they blundered on move 19 and printed it anyway.

That last version is the best. A shirt commemorating your own catastrophe is very funny to everybody who was in the room.

Are notated games somebody's property?

The moves themselves aren't — a game record is a factual sequence, and chess games are published and replayed freely as a matter of course.

What is somebody's: the specific annotations, commentary and analysis a writer produced about a game, and any publisher's diagram styling. So a bare move list is fine; a reproduction of an annotated page from a book isn't.

Player names are facts too, though a shirt reading like it commemorates somebody else's famous win is worth thinking about socially rather than legally.

Why show the board as well?

Because the diagram is the part strangers can read.

A move column alone is a wall of text to a non-player. A board with pieces on it is instantly recognisable as chess, so the diagram does the outward-facing job while the notation does the inward one.

That's the double reading this batch keeps returning to — a graphic to everyone, a document to some.

Which position should the diagram show?

The moment before the interesting thing.

Not checkmate — the position two moves earlier, where the decision was still available. Players looking at it will start calculating, which is precisely the reaction you want and the reason puzzle diagrams work.

Choosing the position is the actual design decision here, and it's one only the player can make.

Does it work for a club?

Very well, and it's an underserved case.

A club shirt with the club's founding year and a position from a famous club game is a genuinely good object. So is a set where everybody gets their own game — same design, different notation, each shirt a different person's night.

That's a set rather than a uniform, and no minimum makes it a normal thing to do.

Does notation print well?

Yes, and monospace is again the reason.

A move list is naturally aligned in two columns with consistent character widths — it's the most print-friendly kind of dense text there is. The board is flat squares and hard-edged pieces.

The only constraint is length: twenty moves is a design, sixty is grey texture. Truncate at the interesting point, which is also better storytelling.

How do I get one made?

Give the game at JustOG — the moves, and which position the diagram should show. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Somebody could replay your whole game off your chest. That's not true of any other sport.