Chess Life and Chess Review Archives

UPDATED May 2023: The Chess Life Kids (and School Mates!) digital archive is now live. Please note that this publication did not have a continuous print run prior to 2006.

Welcome to the complete digital archive of Chess Life and Chess Review magazines (as well as titles such as Chess Life & Review). This archive is available to the general public at no charge as part of our non-profit educational mission to empower people, enrich lives, and enhance communities through chess. It does not contain the most current 12 months of Chess Life; those are only available to US Chess members. Each month, a new PDF will be rotated in to keep the archive current.

Chess Life began in 1946. Chess Review began in 1933 and ended its run in 1969 when it merged with Chess Life.

These PDFs are fully text searchable; you can search for names, old TLAs, and even for every mention of specific moves such as 1. P-K4 or Bb4. If you have Adobe Acrobat PRO, you can text search your entire archive without the files being opened.

To download: The archives are divided between Chess Life and Chess Review. Within each, they are subdivided in folders by year. By clicking on a folder, you can then download each individual issue within that year by right-clicking on the file link and selecting "save target as." Alternatively, you can click on the folder next to the year labeled "ALL" and download a single PDF with all of that year's issues within one file.

The PDFs are made available to the general public for personal and research use only. If you wish to use them beyond the "fair use" provision of U.S. copyright law, then you must seek the permission of US Chess by writing to US Chess Senior Director of Strategic Communication Dan Lucas.

Please be aware that during the initial months of this release, we expect download traffic to be heavy and this could affect the download speed and availability; please be patient. Should you not wish to download these files yourself, US Chess Sales plans to sell an external hard drive preloaded with the files. No availability date has been announced yet.

We hope you enjoy this archive and that it aids in your research efforts. If you notice any errors or corrupt files, please notify us at Click here to show email address.