According to /tg/, chess is just a cheap western knockoff of the much superior ancient Chinese game ofgoWei Qi, even though neither are in any way similar to each other. Despite its rampant popularity, it is obvious it fails in every way to simulate war, tactics, combat or anything else it has been hyped over for centuries about. Common complaints include the lack of army list and deployment options, the Knight's plain weird movement and the fact that the King is both the most important piece and completely useless.
Rules
Basic rules
Two players play this game.
Just as planned. That's not even a legal move!The players' goal is to kill the King of the opponent. This is called a checkmate; the Persian "Shāh Māt" literally means "The king is dead" with some changes in Arabic. If the king is threatened, we call it check and - because of the Brutality Rule (below) (and because you would immediately lose after it) - you cannot allow him to be killed. You have to:
move the King away,
get a piece of your own between the King and the piece threatening to provide cover or
capture the attacker piece.
If you can't do any of these, the death of the King is inevitable; you lose.
If a King is dead, his troops will surrender IMMEDIATELY. If you expose your king but you can kill the enemy king in the next move, you still lose (and thus, are not allowed to expose him in the first place, because of the Rule of Brutality).
You can also lose when you resign, or if you run out of time (on a timed game, only professional games). If neither player has enough resources to kill the enemy King, or if both players agree to this, the game ends in a tie. Stalemate also ends the game in a tie, look below.
The game doesn't encourage passive play, if the same position is repeated three times or if 50 turns pass without moving a pawn or killing anyone, there is no progress made and both players are allowed (not forced) to claim a tie.
The arena
The battlefield is an 8 by 8 board, the columns (files) marked with letters, the rows (ranks) with numbers so that the squares can be referenced easily (with d4 or similarly). The board is checkered, h1 is white.
The game is played in turns, one turn is the period of time between (for example) before white's move to after black's next move.
Brutality rule
Even pre-teen kids play this game, so no actual killing is ever shown. The game ends if a king is threatened with inevitable "capture". So, it's against the rules to expose your king (for example, by moving a piece previously granting cover to the king (think of it as if the piece was pinned down) or moving the king to a threatened square) because the opponent could kill the king. (These moves would only be good for losing anyway.) Also, when killing any other pieces, it's officially called capturing them.
Combat system
In this game, initiative is key because there aren't tons of hit points granted for every piece. If your piece attacks first, even a pawn can kill the enemy queen, because everyone has only a single wound. Everyone is always surprised (apparently they don't really want to fight and are forced to by the king) so if it's your turn, you can capture any piece you threaten. You can't attack pieces through cover (except with the Knight). You can't move without attacking (except with the pawn) but you can attack empty squares too (again, except with the pawn). If you attack either an empty square or an enemy piece, you'll win the fight and you must move the attacking piece to the attacked square. This move is compulsory, you cannot decide not to. You can't attack your own piece, even when they provide cover for the enemy, we aren't savages here. Quite easy and streamlined, eh? Guess it reminds you of something...
The Pieces
Unlike similar games, you don't get to assemble your battleforce. It is probably because the field is rather small (40' by 40'), and both players have 16 pieces. So the starting force is the same for both players (an approximately 38-point army).
King: ♔ ♚ One of the weakest individual pieces, he is on the battlefield to give the army a morale bonus to fight indefinitely. (I think they drug their troops.) He can attack all the squares around him like any basic D&D characters. He isn't worth any points but you must field one to play, and he is subject to the Brutality rule as outlined above.
Rook: ♖ ♜ You have two of these powerful pieces. They are basically castles with cannons on them so they can attack everything in the row and column they are on(but watch out, Cover rules apply for them too). Just like everyone else, they can only attack once per turn. Funnily enough, they too have to move to the square they attacked. Capable of "Castling," a complex maneuver outlined below. They are said to be worth 5 points.
Bishop: ♗ ♝ People will tell you that they have similar powers to the Rook. Don't believe them! Basically, they can do everything the Rook can, but only diagonally, which means that half of the battlefield is simply as unreachable as another continent. This is why you get two of them, one for the white squares, and another for the black. Due to this limitation, they are considered worth less than the Rooks at 3 points.
Queen: ♕ ♛ This is easy. She gets to do everything the Rook AND the Bishop can. She is the strongest piece in your army, she really doesn't get -4 STR. Tournament rules only permit fielding one Queen per army, but an army can airdrop the equipment to turn a Pawn into another Queen as reinforcements in the late game if they can get far enough into enemy territory. Point value is 9, and worth every one.
Knight: ♘ ♞ This is the most controversial piece of the Chess army. People will tell you that it's difficult to keep in mind how they can attack. Lies! It's very easy: a Knight is basically a character with a reach weapon. He can't attack squares next to him and he can attack all the squares 10 feet of him, except the ones which the Queen would be able to (most likely balance reasons). This leaves 8 targetable squares, arranged in L-shapes around him. He is also the only piece able to attack pieces behind cover. Still, for their limited range and mobility, the are considered as valuable as a bishop unit at 3 points.
Pawn: ♙ ♟ The backbone of your army, they are the only ones which can move without attacking. You've got 8 of them, and they can move only forward one step in a turn. If they haven't moved or attacked yet, they can move two squares to give them a head start. However, unlike most pieces, they can't attack forward, only diagonally, forward-left or forward-right, and they can't attack empty squares. They seem quite weak and indeed, they are the unit against which others are measured, being worth only a single point, but this changes when they reach the opponent's end of the battlefield. When they are there, they don't become unusable, they get special powers instead: They will become a queen, a rook, a bishop or a knight (your choice). No you cannot make your pawn into another king, as much sense as it would make to have a backup (or not, given that doubling your opponent's chances for a checkmate or Brutality rule shenanigans is effin' stupid). This doesn't even take a turn, at the moment they reach the end of the battlefield, you can switch the pieces. In professional play, the arbiter can provide you with the extra piece, in casual play, you can just use counters. If your opponent claims that you can only use previously captured pieces, either he lies or I do right now, and it's not a bad idea to just agree on this sort of thing in advance.
Army setup
White can field pieces from a1 to h2, black from h8 to a7. Each army is built with 38 points + one "King" command unit. Flexibility was sacrificed for the sake of game balance, so both armies must deploy the same units in a strict predefined formation. This is enforced even outside tournament matches; almost all chess players will refuse to play if you don't assemble and deploy your 38-point army in this manner.
You place the King and the Queen to the middle of the row closest to the players: Queens d1 and d8, Kings e1 and e8.
Next to them (c1, g1, c8, g8) come the bishops, then the knights and finally the rooks.
The second row (a-h 2 and a-h 7) is filled with the 8 pawns of the players.
The gameplay
First both players roll a die. Whoever rolled higher rejoices; white starts. The players take turns after each other to play.
To maximize tactical combat, you and your opponent can use only one piece in a turn, unlike games where you move all of them in the same turn.
In your turn, you have to attack (or move) with a piece. You can't pass. After all, this battle is lead by The King Himself, we can't just do nothing!
If you can't move but your King isn't threatened right now, the game ends in a tie. This is called a stalemate and is often the refuge of the inferior side in the endgame.
Variants
Chess is nothing but a huge ripoff of older and cooler games (Shatranj, Chess with elephants, hell yes) but has still managed to give birth to a few amusing variants. One is commonly called "Bughouse" (like that has to do with anything) or "4 player chess". Most people cry witchcraft at this point, but it actually works. Bughouse is two teams playing against each other so that one member of each team is white and the other is black. (It's racist but what can you do?) Every time your partner takes a piece he hands it to you. Every turn you have you can either move a piece that's already on the board or drop that captured piece on any unoccupied square. Yes, this makes surprise butt sex possible through chess. By playing this way you can annoy your opponent for hours by dropping pawns all over the place as long as you have a partner with half a brain. Usually Bughouse is played on a very limited clock because no one wants to watch slow butt sex.
WARNING: Do not attempt Bughouse unless you are actually good at chess or you are likely to break your brain. A game does not get to be called Bughouse because it is played by the sane.
There are also a variety of 3D chess versions but only Trekkies know how to play them, so nobody cares. An interesting (in a mind-bendingly weird sort of way) variant is Timecube Chess, in which chess is played in the past, future, and four simultaneous presents.
Now if you payed attention to what you just read, you may have guessed that western chess came from a much older (and more interesting) indian version. And that indian version did not just spawn a few variant in Europe but in eastern Asia as well. One well-known version is Shogi or japanese chess. It has two-sided pieces, a promotion system that arguably makes some pieces less interesting once promoted, a supply/capture system and some more subtlties that make some say that it is superior to all other versions of chess, but all in all, it's not really that exciting. Like most things in Japan, especially overly complicated games that are not role-playing games, it is considered serious business.
Another variant is Xiangqi or chinese chess. There is a promotion system as well, plus the game has elephants, chariots that player call cars or tanks nowadays, catapults or cannons, your king*BLAM!*None shall taint the name of the Holy Emperor by putting him in a game!*RE-BLAM!*The emperor is a coward and is holding the glorious revolution of the people back! general has two personal guards, each side has a fortress and there is a river in the middle of the battlefield. Much like western chess, all these elements are not enough to make it awesome because all of them are held back by the rules and by some logical flaws. The elephants cannot cross the river and have a stupid movement pattern so they can only be used in defense and have only seven possible positions on the board making them easy to threaten. At the end of the day, your two elephants are just trying to protect each other. The two guards cannot leave the fortress, meaning that they have only five possible positions on the board and are pretty useless. Firing the catapult moves it to the destination of the projectileand you can only fire it if there is something between it and its target. The promotion system only applies to pawns and the horse has the same movement pattern as the knight but cannot jump over other units. Since there is no equivalent of the bishop and queen, the car (which moves exactly like the rook) and the catapult (that has a pretty retarded movement patter) are the only pieces that can really help you control the board. Xiangqi also has loads of variants including one with four players, supplies and no river (meaning that the elephants can finally be useful), a version played mostly in Hong Kong that is pretty similar to Stratego, one based on the Three Kingdoms war for three players...
Xiangqi is not that different from western chess in that the game is not as awesome as it sounds, and the general is the central piece of the game and is completely useless unless you are a manly man and decide to move your general out of the fortres and checkmate with him. That tactic is called feijiang and contrary to popular belief, does not translate to "flying general" but is chinese for "fuck you".
There is also a thai variant that resembles western chess and is actually more interesting, but nobody cares about it.
Special rules
En Passant
The foreign name is because this is a stupid rule from a previous edition buried right at the back where nobody reads it. It's clearly an attempt by chess's authors to imitate D&D's "attack of opportunity," proving that chess is really just a bad knock-off of 4th edition D&D. If an enemy pawn moves two squares on its first move, and it arrives right next to (1 step to the left or the right) a pawn of yours, you can take it as if it only moved 1 square; the pawn is moved into the square the enemy pawn moved over (ie, where it would be if it had only moved one square) and the enemy pawn removed. This is the only way to take a piece in chess without ever occupying the same square as it. Absolutely nobody knows this rule exists the first time they encounter it; in fact, one of the biggest challenges in writing grandmaster-level chess programs is programming them to argue for half an hour that you can't do that with a pawn.
Castling
If you think that your King is too exposed, you can "castle" him by moving the King two squares toward the Rook you want to use for this maneuver, and immediately placing the castle to the far side of the king. This is a very unrealistic representation of the king retreating to his castle, since there have been approximately zero real-life battles where a king hid behind a castle and the castle responded by wandering off and killing two knights and a member of the enemy clergy. It only takes one turn and thus, is a really powerful move, as no other Chess maneuver can re-position multiple pieces. However, this has multiple conditions:
The King and the Rook you want to use haven't attacked or moved yet this game.
There are no pieces between the Rook and the King.
The King isn't threatened and he doesn't move through threatened squares (we assume that in older editions all pieces got AoOs against the King and this move was forbidden because of the Brutality Rule). Of course you cannot move him onto a threatened square either. These rules don't apply to the Rook.
To munchkins: The King and the Rook must be on the same row, you cannot castle with a pawn-rook.
How to suck at chess
F2-F3 E7-E5 G2-G4 D8-H4
If this happens to you, the game says you are an idiot.
Professional players claim that Chess is serious business so they invented a lot of extra rules like this association football throw-in rule: "At the moment of delivering the ball, the thrower must face the field of play, have both feet on the ground on or outside the touch line, and use both hands to deliver the ball from behind and over his head." - unnecessary rules that exist solely for the sake of penalizing the other player. Seriously: 310 words just about the shit you gotta do when TOUCHING the pieces. I won't 1d4ise these, so go to The Other Wiki and see for yourself.
If any of the rules aren't clear for you, why the fuck are you reading a wiki about this? There's a goddamn store in my neighborhood that sells ONLY books about chess. It's been done to death; there's probably entire shelves about chess at your local library.
