This is an early conversion of my first chess-related Perl program, chess.pl, which provided just enough functionality to permit tracking the movements of pieces throughout a game. One notable feature is the ability to provide incomplete ply notation, allowing the program to figure out the type of the piece being moved, or whether the ply represents a capture (x) or occupation (-). This functionality will be broadened in the future to permit partial space specification (e.g. `cxd4'), and other cases of standard chess move notation.