Chess is a game for two players, one with the white pieces and one with the black. Each has an army of sixteen pieces, and each wants the same thing: to trap the other side’s king so that it cannot escape. That is the whole goal. Everything else — the openings, the tactics, the endgames — is just the long road to it.
The board has 64 squares in an 8 × 8 grid, alternating light and dark. The columns running up the board are called files and are lettered a to h, from White’s left to White’s right. The rows running across are called ranks and are numbered 1 to 8, starting from White’s side. Every square therefore has a name: the bottom-left corner is a1, the top-right is h8.
One detail matters before any piece is placed: the board must be turned so that each player has a light square in the right-hand corner. The old saying is “light on the right”. Set it up the other way and the king and queen end up swapped.
The back row, from the corners inwards, goes rook, knight, bishop on each side, with the queen and king in the two middle squares. The row in front is filled with eight pawns. Black’s army is a mirror image of White’s, so the kings face each other on the same file, and so do the queens.
The only part people mix up is the king and queen. The rule to remember is “queen on her own colour”: the white queen goes on the light square in the middle, the black queen on the dark one. The kings take the square left over.
White always moves first. After that the players alternate, one move each, for the rest of the game. A move means moving one of your own pieces — just one, with a single exception called castling, where the king and a rook move together.
You cannot pass. Whenever it is your turn, you must make a move, even if every move available to you makes your position worse. This sounds like a small rule, but in the endgame it decides many games: sometimes the side that has to move is the side that loses.
Pieces capture by moving onto a square occupied by an enemy piece. The captured piece is removed from the board and plays no further part in the game. You can never capture one of your own pieces, and — apart from one special pawn capture called en passant — a piece always captures by landing exactly where the enemy piece stood.
All the pieces capture the same way they move, except the pawn, which moves straight ahead but captures diagonally. How each piece moves is explained in How the pieces move.
A game can be won in three ways:
And a game can end with nobody winning at all. There are several ways to reach a draw, from stalemate to repeating the same position three times; they are all in How a game ends in a draw.
If you are brand new, the best order is: learn how the pieces move, then the special moves, then check and checkmate. After that, the fastest way to improve is not reading but playing. Our Beginner bots are built to make the kind of mistakes new players make, so you can win your first games and learn from both sides of every blunder.
Chess pieces: “cburnett” set by Colin M. L. Burnett, CC BY-SA 3.0.
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