Brain Games
All games
Brain Games › Games › Chess
Chess
Board · Classics · plays in your browser, no download
No dice, no hidden cards, nothing you cannot see. Everything that happens on a chessboard is something one of the two players chose. That is what makes it merciless and what has kept it alive for fifteen centuries.
Where it comes from
The ancestor is chaturanga, played in northern India by the sixth century. The name means four limbs — the four arms of an Indian army: infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots. They are still on the board. The pawn, the knight, the bishop and the rook are those four arms, carried across a thousand years and several languages and barely changed in how they move.
It passed into Persia as shatranj, and from there, with the Arab expansion, into Spain, Sicily and the rest of Europe. But shatranj was a slow game. Its queen — the firzān, the counsellor, which Spanish turned into alferza — moved one square diagonally and nothing more. The bishop jumped exactly two squares and could only ever reach an eighth of the board. Games took a very long time to open up.
Then, in Valencia around 1475, the queen and the bishop were given the long moves they have now. The earliest surviving text with the new rules is a Valencian poem, Scachs d’amor, written by Castellví, Vinyoles and Fenollar: it tells a love story as a game of chess, and the game inside it ends with the white queen giving mate on move twenty-one. Contemporaries called the new version mad queen chess, and they meant it as a complaint. It was two or three times faster than what they were used to. Twenty years later, in 1495, Francesch Vicent printed the first book of problems for it.
After that the rest is familiar: Ruy López’s treatise in 1561, the first match generally counted as a world championship in 1886 between Steinitz and Zukertort, Deep Blue beating Kasparov in 1997, and in 2017 AlphaZero teaching itself the game from the rules alone in a few hours and playing it in a way that looked, to the professionals watching, distinctly odd and extremely strong.
How the pieces move
| Pawn | One square forward, two on its first move, captures diagonally. Reach the far rank and it becomes any piece you ask for. |
|---|---|
| Knight | An L: two and one. The only piece that jumps. |
| Bishop | Any distance diagonally. It never leaves its own colour. |
| Rook | Any distance in a straight line. |
| Queen | Rook and bishop together. The piece the fifteenth century added. |
| King | One square in any direction, and he may never move into check. |
Two special moves catch everybody out once. Castling: king and rook move together, two squares and over, allowed only if neither has moved, nothing stands between them, and the king is not in check and does not pass through it. En passant: a pawn that pushes two squares to slip past an enemy pawn can be taken as if it had only pushed one — but only immediately, on the very next move.
The game ends in checkmate, in resignation, or in a draw — by stalemate, by agreement, by threefold repetition, or by fifty moves with no capture and no pawn moved.
Our version
A real engine at several strengths, move-by-move analysis after the game, and boards and pieces worth looking at. Nothing to install and no account to make.
Three things that help
Get the pieces out before you start attacking. An attack with two pieces loses to a defence with four. Knights and bishops first, king safe, then think about a plan.
Control the middle. A knight on the edge of the board touches four squares; in the centre it touches eight. That ratio is most of what opening theory is about.
Before every move, ask what changed. Almost every blunder below master level is a piece that was defended last turn and is not defended now.