Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

I just installed Noto Sans Symbols on my computer, and it does not appear to have its own set of Chess pieces. In NexusFont, it is defaulting to MS Gothic or MS Mincho, and in paint.net, it is defaulting to Meiryo or Segoe UI.

That's strange. Noto Sans Symbol definitely has chess pieces; it covers the entire Miscellanous Symbols block up to Unicode 6.0, among others.

Give me a link where I can download the version you have or see this for myself.

The version I have was provided by my Linux distribution. Google's own link is here.

That's where I got it from last night. I have already checked the Noto fonts on Linux Mint, but they didn't seem to include their own Chess pieces, and I never saw the pieces I saw on my Kindle Fire on Linux Mint. What Linux distribution are you using?

Fedora (a fairly old version thereof, since I'm not very dutiful about upgrading).

I wonder if Mint messed something up in their distribution? It doesn't make sense for them to deliberately take them out, and it's not like they're new additions to Unicode (they've been included since Unicode 1.0).

Do any of these tests show the same pieces as displayed on my Kindle Fire? They don't for me, not even in Fedora, which I tried with Virtualbox. It came with some versions of Noto Sans, but not Noto Sans Symbol.

The last one does on my computer:

So I was wrong, the font name is Noto Sans Symbols, not Noto Sans Symbol. The other two match DejaVu Sans on my computer, which is probably the first fallback in my font stack.

I got the same results on Linux Mint, and I found a site with a font preview that confirms it. So, I have moved it to the list of free fonts. Thanks.

I'd like to nominate Nishiki-Teki. It's a cartoony "pop" font that takes a manga-styled approach to the detailed "traditional style" (kings and queens with decoration, rooks with masonry, knights with bases, realistic pawns) chess symbols. It also has variant pieces in its very extensive Private Use Area, mostly following Quivira's lead but with a few others from Unicode proposals, from U+FC2E0 to U+FC39E. The site is bilingual in Japanese and English.

Thanks, I have added Nishiki-teki to the page.

The "appendices" to Nishiki-teki are just other (non-free) fonts by the same designer. The one with variant pieces is obsolete because those pieces are all in Nishiki-teki proper now (you can find them in the PDF listing Nishiki-teki's Private Use Area). The basic xiangqi pieces are also in Nishiki-teki at their correct Unicode code points; Westernized symbols are in the PUA, as are Westernized Shogi pieces, though the dedicated fonts also have extras for Xiangqi and Shogi variants.

The current text kind of makes it sound like you need the appendices for variant pieces, but you don't. They're in there already.

Testing: 󼋠 should be a White Chess Elephant

It looks like you're right. I have the font installed, and I got a white elephant.

Where are the Xiangqi and Shogi pieces? I couldn't find those in the font.

Looks like I misremembered. I thought that the Unicode xiangqi characters had been added but apparently not.

The Westernized xiangqi and shogi characters are with the other variant pieces in the Private Use Area. They have names like BLACK CHESS MANDARIN and WHITE CHESS SILVER GENERAL. 

The western style pieces you mention are not circular or wedge shaped, and they are missing some of the images I can see on the page for the font, such as the circular arrow piece, but at least they do include images that can be used for Shogi and Xiangqi, and it would be possible to add these images to the appropriate shapes to make piece sets out of them.

A few more for you:

Chess Merida Unicode is Marroquín's Chess Merida font remapped to the official Unicode code points (glyphs that are not in Unicode, e.g. the pieces on dark squares, are in the Private Use Area). It doesn't contain any glyphs that aren't in the original, so it's strictly for chess only.

Everson Mono is a monospace font with extensive Unicode coverage. The chess symbols are piece outlines/silhouettes rather than the more traditional printed forms, and can be a bit hard to distinguish, particularly at small point sizes.

Fairfax is a 6×12 pixel bitmap font with extensive Unicode coverage and, like Nishiki-teki, an extensive Private Use Area as well (though it does not include variant pieces). The standard chess pieces can be hard to make out, since they're limited to 72-pixel blocks, but points for trying, and it's nice to know that if for some reason you need to use figurine algebraic notation in Klingon text on a console command line, there is a font for you. Unfortunately, Fairfax's non-bitmap "sister" font, Constructium, contains no chess pieces at all.

Nishiki-Teki and Symbola both now support the heterodox chess symbols added to the Chess Symbols block in Unicode 12.0.