Contents
What you need to play
Chess is a game for two opponents on a board of 64 squares. Each has 16 pieces: one plays White, the other Black. White always moves first, then the players take turns, one move each. You cannot skip a move.
Each side has:
- king — 1;
- queen — 1;
- rooks — 2;
- bishops — 2;
- knights — 2;
- pawns — 8.
How to set up the board and the pieces is explained in the articles “The chessboard and coordinates” and “Setting up the pieces”.
The goal of the game is checkmate
Your task is to checkmate the opponent's king: attack the king so that it has nowhere to go, nothing to block with and no piece that can capture the attacker. In chess the king is never “taken”: the game ends the moment checkmate is delivered.
An attack on the king is called check. If your king is in check, you must respond — more in the article “Check”.
Here is the shortest checkmate possible in chess. White has made two weak pawn moves and exposed the king:
1. 2.
How the pieces move
Each piece moves in its own way: the rook along straight lines, the bishop along diagonals, the queen both ways, the knight in an “L”. The pawn moves only forward but captures diagonally. All the rules with diagrams are in the article “How the pieces move”.
A piece captures an enemy piece by moving onto its square; the captured piece is removed from the board. You cannot capture your own pieces, and only the knight can jump over other pieces.
There are three special moves worth learning separately:
- castling — a move of the king and a rook at the same time;
- en passant — a special pawn capture;
- promotion: on reaching the last rank, a pawn becomes any piece except a king (most often a queen).
How a game ends
- Checkmate — a win for the player who delivered it.
- Resignation — a player may admit defeat without waiting for checkmate.
- Draw — by agreement, by stalemate, by threefold repetition, by the 50-move rule, or when neither side has enough material to mate. Details in the article “Draw”.
- Time — in a game with a clock, the player whose time runs out first loses.
The touch-move rule
Tournaments have a strict rule: if you touch one of your pieces, you must move it; if you touch an opponent's piece, you must capture it (if that is legal). You may straighten a piece on its square, but you must first say “I adjust” (or “j'adoube”).