Welcome. If you have never played a game of chess, or you have played "somehow" and are not sure it was quite right, this page is for you. We will go through everything you need in order to sit down at the board and play correctly, in the order that makes sense to learn it. No rush. Chess is not learned by heart, chess is understood, and understanding comes quickly once things are put in order.
One thing first: nobody plays nicely at the start. We have all knocked pieces over, forgotten whose move it was and mixed up a bishop with a knight. That is part of the story. Let us begin.
The board and setting up the pieces
Chess is played on a board of 64 squares, arranged in an 8x8 grid, alternately light and dark ("white" and "black").
The first rule you will remember forever: light square in the bottom right corner. When you put the board in front of you, your far right corner (nearest rank, right-hand side) must be a light square. If it is dark, turn the board around. There is a rhyme every child knows: light on the right.
Each player has 16 pieces: a king, a queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights and eight pawns.
Now the set-up. The ranks nearest each player are filled like this:
- The rooks go in the corners.
- Next to them the knights.
- Then the bishops.
- Two squares are left in the middle, for the king and the queen.
- The whole rank in front of that is filled with pawns (all eight).
One question remains: which of the king and queen goes on which square? Here the second golden rule helps: the queen loves her own colour. The white queen stands on a light square, the black queen on a dark square. The king automatically comes next to her, on the remaining square. If you have put the queen on the wrong colour, you know something is off.
And one more thing: White always moves first. That is why the white side has a small, slight advantage, like the serve in tennis.
How each piece moves
This is the heart of everything. Once this is in your fingers, all the rest is built on top. With each piece I will also give its value, an approximate "number of points" that helps you judge whether an exchange is good or bad. These are not rules of the game but a compass for decisions.
Pawn: value 1
The modest pawn moves only forward, one square, and never backwards. But it has two exceptions many people forget:
- From its starting square it may jump two squares at once (or one, as you prefer).
- It captures diagonally, one square forward at an angle, never straight ahead. It is the only piece that does not capture the way it moves.
The pawn is an infantryman: it advances slowly, but if it crosses the whole board a miracle happens (see promotion below).
Knight: value 3
The knight moves in the shape of the letter "L": two squares in one direction and then one to the side, or the other way round. The easiest way to picture it is as a jump from one square to the nearest square of the opposite colour that is not on the same rank or file.
What makes it special: the knight jumps over pieces. It is the only one that does not care about a crowd; it can hop out of the most closed position. That makes it dangerous and sneaky; beginners most often "drop" a piece to a knight.
Bishop: value 3
The bishop moves diagonally, as many squares as it likes, as long as the path is clear. Each player has two bishops, one on the light squares and one on the dark ones, and each of them stays on its own colour for the whole game. A light-squared bishop never lands on a dark square, and vice versa.
Rook: value 5
The rook moves in straight lines: along ranks (horizontally) and files (vertically), as many squares as it likes. It is powerful, it loves open, empty lines and it is especially strong towards the end of the game.
Queen: value 9
The queen is the most powerful piece on the board: she combines the strength of a rook and a bishop. She moves in straight lines and diagonally, as many squares as she likes, in every direction. So look after her: losing the queen usually means losing the game. But watch out for the other trap too: if you bring her out too early, your opponent will chase her and you will lose time defending her.
King: priceless
The king moves one square in any direction (straight and diagonally). It looks weak, and it is. It is slow. But the king is not measured in points because he must not be lost: the whole game revolves around his safety. The king may never step onto an attacked square, nor stand right next to the enemy king.
The same applies to every piece except the knight: they cannot jump over other pieces. And only one piece may stand on a square. If you want to move onto a square occupied by an enemy piece, you capture it (it comes off the board and your piece takes its place). You may not move onto a square occupied by your own piece.
Castling: the only move with two pieces at once
Castling is a special and very useful move in which the king and a rook move at the same time. It serves to tuck the king away safely in the corner and bring the rook into play. Almost every good game begins with castling in the first ten moves or so.
How it looks:
- Short castling (on the king's side): the king moves two squares towards the rook, and the rook hops over him and lands right beside him. In notation: 0-0.
- Long castling (on the queen's side): the same principle, only on the longer side; the rook travels a little further. In notation: 0-0-0.
Castling is allowed only if all of these conditions are met:
- Neither the king nor that rook has moved since the start of the game.
- The squares between the king and the rook are empty.
- The king is not in check at that moment.
- The king does not pass over an attacked square, nor end up on an attacked square.
In short: you do not castle out of check, through check, or into check. This detail, that the king may not pass through an attacked square, can confuse even top players: attempts at illegal castling are seen from time to time even at big tournaments. A small trick for the order: when you castle, touch the king first and the rook second, because under the rules, if you touch the rook first, the arbiter may read it as a rook move.
En passant: "in passing"
This is the rule that surprises absolutely every beginner, and many only find out about it after a year of playing. It is so counter-intuitive that en passant is probably the most frequently reported "bug" on chess websites: players see it, think it is a program error and report it to support. So we learn it right away.
Imagine your pawn is standing on the fifth rank (for White), ready to capture anything that comes diagonally next to it. Your opponent moves the pawn beside it two squares at once from its starting square, so that it slips past yours, avoiding the capture.
The en passant rule (French for "in passing") says: you may capture it as if it had moved only one square. Your pawn goes diagonally to the square the opponent's pawn skipped over, and the opponent's pawn comes off the board.
Two important conditions:
- It works only when the enemy pawn makes the two-square jump and thereby ends up exactly beside your pawn.
- You have to do it immediately, on the very next move; if you play something else, the right to capture en passant is gone.
It seems strange, but the logic is fair: the two-square pawn jump was introduced to make the game faster, and en passant exists so that the jump does not become a cheap way of dodging a fight.
Pawn promotion: the little soldier becomes a queen
Remember that a pawn only goes forward and never comes back? That means it has one goal: to cross the whole board. When a pawn reaches the last rank (the eighth for White, the first for Black), promotion happens.
The pawn is taken off the board and exchanged for any piece you like: a queen, a rook, a bishop or a knight (not a king, and you cannot stay a pawn either, promotion is compulsory).
In the vast majority of cases people choose a queen, because she is the strongest. That is why people say the pawn "queened". But there is also underpromotion, rare but real: sometimes a knight gives mate or a fork that a queen cannot. And yes, it is perfectly legal to have two (or more) queens on the board at once. If you do not physically have a second queen, an upside-down rook or any agreed marker does the job; at a tournament you ask the arbiter for a piece.
Check, checkmate and stalemate
Now we come to the aim of the game. And the aim of chess is not to eat all your opponent's pieces but to trap the enemy king.
Check
Check is when the king is directly attacked, when some enemy piece threatens to capture him on the next move. When you are in check you must react immediately, and you have exactly three ways to do it:
- Move the king to a square that is not attacked.
- Block the check by putting one of your pieces between the attacker and the king (this does not work against a knight or against an adjacent piece).
- Capture the piece giving check.
If any one of those three moves exists, you are not in trouble, you just get out of it. A note for the table: in tournament chess you do not say "check" out loud; your opponent is expected to see it. At home, among friends, saying it is perfectly fine and even handy while learning.
Checkmate
Checkmate is the end of the game: the king is in check and none of those three escapes exists. The king is not captured, in chess the king is never physically taken off the board, he is inescapably trapped. Whoever gives mate has won. The game ends there.
Worth remembering: mate can come with only a few pieces, and even very early. There is the notorious fool's mate in two moves, proof that carelessness is expensive from the very first moment.
Stalemate: the draw that hurts
Stalemate is the trickiest outcome for beginners. Stalemate happens when a player is to move but has no legal move, and their king is NOT in check. The king cannot go anywhere (every square is attacked) and no other piece can move either.
The result: a draw. Not a win, a draw.
Why does that matter? Because when you have a big advantage you will be tempted to chase your opponent's lone king around. If in that chase you take away every square without giving check, you have ruined a won game yourself. Countless times a player a queen up has "killed" the win by stalemate. So the rule for the end of the game is: leave the king some air until you are ready to give mate.
Draws: all five ways
A game does not have to end in a win. Here are all the ways it can be a draw:
- Agreement. Both players simply agree that it is a draw and shake hands. It is polite to offer a draw only after you have made your move, and not to repeat the offer over and over (that disturbs your opponent).
- Stalemate. The one we have just explained: no legal move, and no check either.
- Threefold repetition. If exactly the same position (the same pieces on the same squares, the same player to move, the same castling and en passant rights) appears three times, the game can be claimed as a draw. It typically arises when one player drives the enemy king back and forth with "perpetual check" and there is no escape.
- The 50-move rule. If during 50 moves (50 by each player) no pawn has moved and no piece has been captured, the game is drawn. The idea is fair: if nobody is making progress, the game cannot go on forever.
- Insufficient material. If there are physically not enough pieces on the board to deliver mate, it is an immediate draw. Classic examples: bare king against bare king; king and one bishop against king; king and one knight against king. Mate is impossible for them, so there is no point continuing.
Ready for a tournament?
This is everything you need in order to sit down and play a real, honest game, at home or with a friend. When you feel like playing a tournament, more rules come into force outside the living room: the chess clock, the compulsory scoresheet, touch-move, how a draw is properly claimed and good manners at the board. We have put all of that into a separate lesson for competitors (Chess at a tournament).
And that is it, you now know the rules of chess. Not the whole wisdom of the game, of course; that is collected over a lifetime. But everything you need in order to sit down, set up the pieces and play a real, honest game is now in your head.
Just remember one thing: mistakes are normal, both at the board and away from it. You will knock a piece over, miss a mate, walk your opponent's king into stalemate when you were a queen up. We have all been there. Set up the board (light on the right!), invite someone, and play. See you at the board.
Click every square the piece may move to, then press Check. Optional, but the best way to practise.