I imagine the game keeping track of whose turn it is and being able to give voice commands to make moves.
Then they could play games over a longer period of time, maybe make one move per day.
the Lilygo T5 with Touch screen + a lipo battery would have all the hardware you need
just need to port chess to the platform after that https://www.hackster.io/Sergey_Urusov/arduino-mega-chess-d54...
figuring out NAT traversal to get them talking to each other from each other's homes might be tricky/fun, but there may be ways around that...
https://www.lilygo.cc/products/t5-4-7-inch-e-paper-v2-3
It would be great to be able to buy this in a size that would mount easily into common photo frame formats.
Ideally with a battery that could last months and optional power.
If I was retired it's the sort of project I'd happily waste time on.
https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...
You could render the current state of the chess game to an image and serve that image on a URL on the internet. Then you can connect the display to that image:
https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...
Admittedly that's still a lot of work from your side, and a little applet to keep running...
https://www.crowdsupply.com/soldered/inkplate-10#products
I imagine the game keeping track of whose turn it is and being able to give voice commands to make moves.
Then they could play games over a longer period of time, maybe make one move per day.