A chessboard is a game board used to play chess. It consists of 64 squares, 8 rows by 8 columns, on which the chess pieces are placed. It is square in shape and uses two colours of squares, one light and one dark, in a chequered pattern. During play, the board is oriented such that each player's near-right corner square is a light square.
The columns of a chessboard are known as files, the rows are known as ranks, and the lines of adjoining same-coloured squares (each running from one edge of the board to an adjacent edge) are known as diagonals. Each square of the board is named using algebraic, descriptive, or numericchess notation; algebraic notation is the FIDE standard. In algebraic notation, using White's perspective, files are labeled a through h from left to right, and ranks are labeled 1 through 8 from bottom to top; each square is identified by the file and rank which it occupies. The a- through d-files constitute the queenside , and the e- through h-files constitute the kingside ; the 1st through 4th ranks constitute White's side, and the 5th through 8th ranks constitute Black's side.
History and evolution
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Ashtāpada board on which chaturanga was played.
The earliest known ancestor of the chessboard is the Ashtāpada board. Among other games, it was used to play chaturanga, a historical precursor to chess, beginning around the 6th century in India. The board uses a single color for all squares and is divided into eight columns by eight rows, with marked squares called castles in the corners of each quadrant. Unlike in Ashtāpada, castles serve no function in chaturanga.[1]
The chessboard acquired its modern chequered pattern in the 10th century with the arrival of chess in Europe.[2] This pattern was based on that of the then-5×5 draughts board.[3] As a result of this change, each diagonal was now highlighted by a continuous sequence of same-coloured squares, which later facilitated the introduction of the modern bishop and queen movements in the 15th century.[4]
The Libro de los juegos (1283) contains a description of the chessboard, describing eight rows and columns as the ideal number, deeming the practice of chess on the 10×10 board too tiresome and on the 6×6 board too quick.[5] In the 13th century, some players began using the convention that the first square of the far right column should be light-coloured; this convention was endorsed by Pedro Damiano at the end of the 15th century.[6]
In contemporary chess, a digital board is a chess board connected to a computer that is capable of transmitting the moves to the computer itself: the information about the moves can be used to play a game against a chess engine, or simply to record the moves sequence of a game in automatic.
A digital board uses sensors to detect the pieces position and each piece move can be recorded.
In 1998 the 33rd Chess Olympiad was held in Elista: the games were digitally broadcast over the internet thanks the introduction of digital chess boards developed by Digital Game Technology: 328 boards were used for the event.[7]
In 2003, the ex-world championGarry Kasparov faced the chess engineX3D Fritz in a series of four matches in a virtual environment, where the computer-generated board hovered in the air in front of Kasparov, who used special glasses. This was the first man–machine game of chess performed in a completely simulated environment.[8]
Manufacture
Chessboards have been made from numerous materials over the years, such as ebony, ivory, marble, metal, glass, and plastic. They can also be found as decorative elements in plazas, gardens, and living rooms.
High-level games generally use wooden boards, while vinyl, plastic, and cardboard are common for less important tournaments and matches, as well as for home use. Additionally, some very large chessboards are built into or drawn on the ground. Rarely, decorative glass and marble boards are permitted for games conducted by national or international chess federations.
Wooden boards are traditionally made of unstained woods that are light brown and dark brown in colour. To reduce cost, some boards are made with veneers of more expensive woods glued to an inner piece of plywood or chipboard. A variety of colour combinations are used for plastic, vinyl, and silicone boards. Common dark-light combinations are black and white, as well as brown, green or blue with buff or cream.
For international or continental championships, FIDE's regulations state that wooden boards should be used. For other FIDE tournaments, wood, plastic, or cardboard boards may be used, and the board should be rigid in all instances. The board may also be made of marble, as long as there is an appropriate contrast between the light and dark squares. The finishing should be neutral or frosted but never shiny. The squares should be from 5 to 6 cm in length, at least twice the diameter of a pawn's base. If the table and the board are two separate pieces, the latter must be fixed so it stays in place.[9]
A chessboard diagram with algebraic notation, generally used for printing or computer displays.
There are various systems for recording moves and referring to the squares of the chessboard; the standard contemporary system is algebraic notation. In algebraic notation, the files are identified by the letters a to h, from left to right from the white player's point of view, and the ranks by the numbers 1 to 8, with 1 being closest to the white player. Each square on the board is identified by a unique coordinate pairing, from a1 to h8.[10]
In the older descriptive notation, the files are labelled by the piece originally occupying its first rank (e.g. queen, king's rook , queen's bishop ), and ranks by the numbers 1 to 8 from each player's point of view, depending on the move being described. This method is no longer commonly used. FIDE stopped using descriptive notation in 1981.
ICCF numeric notation assigns numbers to both files and ranks, with rank 1 being the one closest to the player with the white pieces. The file leftmost to the white player (a in algebraic notation and QR in descriptive notation) is file one and the rightmost to them (h in algebraic notation and KR in descriptive notation) is file eight.
Variant chessboard shapes and sizes go back to the Persian origins of the game in the 10th century, when the book Muraj adh-dhahab (Board of the Gods) described six different variants of chess, including circular and cylinder chess.[11] Due to the widespread creation of new variants, a wide variety of sizes can be found. Gliński's hexagonal chess utilises a board with 91 hexagonal spaces of three different colours. One innovation of the 13th century was the cylindrical board for use in cylinder chess.[12]
The board used for the Persian Tamerlane chess is one of the first recorded variant chessboards, with eleven columns by ten rows along with two citadels. Each player has a citadel to the right of their second rank, which may be occupied by the opponent's king, in which case that opponent may declare a draw.[13] In 1617, Pietro Carrera proposed a variant that received his name, Carrera's Chess, with a 10×8 board, later used in other variants such as Capablanca chess and Gothic Chess. Other sizes, with ten rows by ten columns, are used in Omega Chess and Grand Chess; Omega Chess has four additional squares, one in each corner of the board. Los Alamos chess uses a smaller 6×6 board.[14]
Japanese shogi uses a board with nine columns by nine rows. The board of Chinese xianqi consists of nine columns by ten rows; here, the pieces are placed on the intersections of the lines that divide the squares, rather than within the squares themselves.[15] Each player has a 3×3 palace in the central three columns and the closest three rows, within which the player's general and advisors must stay. Between the central two rows is a river that the elephant cannot cross and past which the soldier increases in strength.[16][17] A similar board without a river is used in Korean janggi.
Chessboards during a match of BughouseSpatial position of the boards in Raumschach
Some chess variants use more than a single board per match. Bughouse chess, for example, involves four players playing two simultaneous matches on separate boards.[18]Alice Chess is a popular variant which is usually played on two boards to facilitate the movement of pieces between the boards.[19]Three-dimensional boards are often represented by multiple two-dimensional boards. Variants may use anywhere from two to eight boards.[20] For example, Raumschach utilises five boards of twenty-five squares each, totaling 125 squares.[20] Another noteworthy variant, Star Trek Chess, utilises a board of sixty-four squares divided into seven levels.[21]Star Trek Chess uses a board with movable parts divided into seven levels. In the initial position, each player occupies two of the movable four-square attack boards. The white pieces start in the lower level, using attack boards connected to this level and the first two rows of the board, while the black pieces start at the top, using the attack boards and first two rows of the third level.[21]
Other representations
Illustration from the book Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, where the chessboard is represented by fields and brooks that Alice must traverse
The game of chess has been represented in the arts since its creation. Chess sets usually had considerable artistic value; they were made of noble materials, such as ebony and ivory, and in large sizes. Many of the pieces in these sets were offered to churches as relics. The book Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis tells a story in which a nobleman, after miraculously escaping from prison, is forced to carry a chessboard until a sanctuary as gesture of gratitude. However, more frequently, there are stories in which the chessboard is used as a weapon. The French tale of Ogier the Dane reports how the son of Charlemagne brutally kills one of Ogier's sons with a chessboard after losing a match, although there is no evidence confirming the veracity of the story.[22]
In 1250, a sermon called Quaedam moralitas de scaccario per Innocentium papum (The Innocent Morality) showed the world as being represented by a chessboard. The white and black squares represented the two conditions of life and death or praise and censure; over these, the pieces, representing humanity, would confront each other in the adversities of the game, which symbolised life.
Due to its simple geometry, the chessboard is often used in mathematical puzzles or problems unrelated to chess, such as the wheat and chessboard problem and the mutilated chessboard problem. The term infinite chessboard is sometimes used to refer to a grid.
Gallery
A chessboard is often painted or engraved on a chess table
A folding wooden chessboard
A Swedish competition standard chessboard made of masonite
DGT Electronic Chessboard that detects moves and interfaces to chess clock and computers
A decorative chessboard made of glass
A portable green and buff vinyl rollup board
A portable green and white mousepad style board designed to lie perfectly flat
Chess is a board game for two players. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to distinguish it from related games such as xiangqi and shogi.
The king is the most important piece in the game of chess. It may move to any adjoining square; it may also perform, in tandem with the rook, a special move called castling. If a player's king is threatened with capture, it is said to be in check, and the player must remove the threat of capture immediately. If this cannot be done, the king is said to be in checkmate, resulting in a loss for that player. A player cannot make any move that places their own king in check. Despite this, the king can become a strong offensive piece in the endgame or, rarely, the middlegame.
The queen is the most powerful piece in the game of chess. It can move any number of squares vertically, horizontally or diagonally, combining the powers of the rook and bishop. Each player starts the game with one queen, placed in the middle of the first rank next to the king. Because the queen is the strongest piece, a pawn is promoted to a queen in the vast majority of cases.
A chess piece, or chessman, is a game piece that is placed on a chessboard to play the game of chess. It can be either white or black, and it can be one of six types: king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, or pawn.
The pawn is the most numerous and weakest piece in the game of chess. It may move one square directly forward, it may move two squares directly forward on its first move, and it may capture one square diagonally forward. Each player begins a game with eight pawns, one on each square of their second rank. The white pawns start on a2 through h2; the black pawns start on a7 through h7.
Algebraic notation is the standard method for recording and describing the moves in a game of chess. It is based on a system of coordinates to uniquely identify each square on the board. It is now almost universally used by books, magazines, newspapers and software, and is the only form of notation recognized by FIDE, the international chess governing body.
The rules of chess govern the play of the game of chess. Chess is a two-player abstract strategy board game. Each player controls sixteen pieces of six types on a chessboard. Each type of piece moves in a distinct way. The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent's king; checkmate occurs when a king is threatened with capture and has no escape. A game can end in various ways besides checkmate: a player can resign, and there are several ways a game can end in a draw.
Descriptive notation is a chess notation system based on abbreviated natural language. Its distinctive features are that it refers to files by the piece that occupies the back rank square in the starting position and that it describes each square two ways depending on whether it is from White or Black's point of view. It was common in English, Spanish and French chess literature until about 1980. In most other languages, the more concise algebraic notation was in use. Since 1981, FIDE no longer recognizes descriptive notation for the purposes of dispute resolution, and algebraic notation is now the accepted international standard.
Three-dimensional chess is any chess variant that replaces the two-dimensional board with a three-dimensional array of cells between which the pieces can move. In practice, this is usually achieved by boards representing different layers being laid out next to each other. Three-dimensional chess has often appeared in science fiction—the Star Trek franchise in particular—contributing to the game's familiarity.
This glossary of chess explains commonly used terms in chess, in alphabetical order. Some of these terms have their own pages, like fork and pin. For a list of unorthodox chess pieces, see Fairy chess piece; for a list of terms specific to chess problems, see Glossary of chess problems; for a list of named opening lines, see List of chess openings; for a list of chess-related games, see List of chess variants; for a list of terms general to board games, see Glossary of board games.
Alice chess is a chess variant invented in 1953 by V. R. Parton which employs two chessboards rather than one, and a slight alteration to the standard rules of chess. The game is named after the main character "Alice" in Lewis Carroll's work Through the Looking-Glass, where transport through the mirror into an alternative world is portrayed on the chessboards by the after-move transfer of chess pieces between boards A and B.
This glossary of chess problems explains commonly used terms in chess problems, in alphabetical order. For a list of unorthodox pieces used in chess problems, see Fairy chess piece; for a list of terms used in chess is general, see Glossary of chess; for a list of chess-related games, see List of chess variants.
Chess notation systems are used to record either the moves made or the position of the pieces in a game of chess. Chess notation is used in chess literature, and by players keeping a record of an ongoing game. The earliest systems of notation used lengthy narratives to describe each move; these gradually evolved into more compact notation systems. Algebraic notation is now the accepted international standard, with several variants. Descriptive chess notation was used in English- and Spanish-language literature until the late 20th century, but is now obsolescent. Portable Game Notation (PGN) is a text file format based on English algebraic notation which can be processed by most chess software. Other notation systems include ICCF numeric notation, used for international correspondence chess, and systems for transmission using Morse code over telegraph or radio. The standard system for recording chess positions is Forsyth–Edwards Notation (FEN).
ICCF numeric notation is the official chess notation system of the International Correspondence Chess Federation. The system was devised for use in international correspondence chess to avoid the potential confusion of using algebraic notation, as the chess pieces have different abbreviations depending on language.
The history of chess can be traced back nearly 1,500 years to its earliest known predecessor, called chaturanga, in India; its prehistory is the subject of speculation. From India it spread to Persia, where it was modified in terms of shapes and rules and developed into Shatranj. Following the Arab invasion and conquest of Persia, chess was taken up by the Muslim world and subsequently spread to Europe via Spain and Italy. The game evolved roughly into its current form by about 1500 CE.
Hexagonal chess is a group of chess variants played on boards composed of hexagon cells. The best known is Gliński's variant, played on a symmetric 91-cell hexagonal board.
In chess, the player who moves first is called White and the player who moves second is called Black. Their pieces are the white pieces and the black pieces. The pieces are often not literally white and black, but usually contrasting light and dark colors. The 64 squares of the chessboard, which is colored in a checkered pattern, are likewise the "white squares" or "light squares", and "black squares" or "dark squares"; they are usually of contrasting light and dark color rather than literally white and black. For example, the squares on vinyl boards may be off-white ("buff") and green, while those on wood boards are often light brown and dark brown.
white: 1. There are 16 light-colored pieces and 32 squares called white. 2. When capitalized, the word refers to the player of the white pieces.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to chess:
Masonic chess is a chess variant invented by George R. Dekle Sr. in 1983. The game is played on a modified chessboard whereby even-numbered ranks are indented to the right—resembling masonry brickwork. The moves of the pieces are adapted to the new geometry; in other respects the game is the same as chess.
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