i understand the rules of chess and how to play, and although i pretty much suck and don't have any idea about proper chess strategy (i'm more of a riichi mahjong player), the concept of mailing written records of chess games from high level players to this many different languages in a pre-internet world is really interesting
for a Fun Fact, on the third image where you can see the actual written notation of several games, any move that's followed by a ? or ?? (e.g., ♖g3??) means that it was considered a bad move (or, in the case of ??, a critically bad move that puts one in jeopardy of losing), and thinking about a player reading their game log and having a third party look at a specific point and go "this is where they fucked themselves" got me good
The mistake (?) and good (!) notations are pretty common, but there's also dubious (?!) and interesting (!?) for particularly risky plays.
