How to Play Chess
Learn chess from nothing: how the board is set up, how every piece moves, what check and checkmate mean, castling, en passant and how games are drawn.
Rules checked against the engine that runs the board on .
Play Chess now Free, in this tab, no sign-up How to play Chess, step by step
-
Set the board up the right way round
Chess is played on a board of sixty-four squares, eight by eight, in two alternating colours. Turn it so that each player has a light square in the near right-hand corner. The back row holds, from the corner inwards, rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, bishop, knight, rook, and the eight pawns stand in front of them. The queen always starts on a square of her own colour: the white queen on a light square, the black queen on a dark one. White moves first, and the players then alternate, one move each, for the whole game.
-
Learn how the pieces move
Each piece moves in its own way, and none of them may pass through another piece except the knight. A rook moves any distance in a straight line along a row or column. A bishop moves any distance diagonally, and so stays on one colour of square all game. The queen does both, which makes her the strongest piece. The king moves one square in any direction. A knight jumps in an L-shape — two squares one way and one square at right angles — and is the only piece that can leap over anything in its path.
-
Learn how pawns move, because they are the exception
A pawn moves straight forward one square, or two squares on its very first move, and it can never move backwards. It does not capture the way it moves: a pawn captures by moving one square diagonally forward onto an enemy piece, and it cannot capture the piece directly in front of it. A pawn that reaches the far end of the board is promoted and must be exchanged for a queen, rook, bishop or knight of its own colour — on this site a small picker appears and you choose.
-
Capture by taking the square
You capture an enemy piece by moving one of your own onto its square; the captured piece is removed from the board and takes no further part in the game. There is no jumping over pieces to capture, and you can never capture your own pieces. Nothing forces you to capture — a capture is a move like any other, and the whole skill of chess is working out which captures are worth making and which are an invitation.
-
Make your first move
Click or tap one of your own pieces and every square it can legally move to is marked with a dot, with a ring around any square where a capture is available. Tap the square you want and the move is made. Illegal moves are simply never offered, including any move that would leave your own king under attack, so you cannot break a rule by accident while you are learning. A good, ordinary first move is to push one of the two central pawns forward two squares.
-
Understand check and checkmate
When a king is attacked by an enemy piece it is said to be in check, and the player must answer it immediately — by moving the king to safety, by capturing the attacking piece, or by putting something in the way. You may never make a move that leaves your own king in check. If a king is in check and there is no legal move that gets it out, that is checkmate and the game is over at once. Checkmate is the object of chess: not capturing the king, but trapping it.
-
Know the ways a game is drawn
Not every game has a winner. If the player to move is not in check but has no legal move at all, the game is a draw by stalemate — a real result that has saved many lost positions. A game is also drawn when the same position occurs three times, when fifty moves pass with no capture and no pawn moved, or when neither side has enough material left to deliver checkmate, such as a lone king against a king and one bishop. This board recognises all four and will tell you which one ended the game.
How each piece moves
where it may move where a pawn may capture
Play Chess That is enough to start. The rest of this page is the reference.
The rules in full
Everything the Chess lesson above skipped: the edge cases, what happens when you run out of moves, how the game ends and how it is scored. 8 sections, written to be looked things up in rather than read straight through — the contents at the top of the page jump to any of them.
The words on the board
- File
- A column of squares running from one player to the other, lettered a to h.
- Rank
- A row of squares running across the board, numbered 1 to 8 from White's side.
- Piece
- Any of the sixteen men a player starts with. Strictly, pawns are not "pieces", which is why you will hear "pieces and pawns".
- Capture
- To move onto a square occupied by an enemy man and remove it from the board.
- Check
- The state of a king that is attacked. It must be answered on the very next move.
- Checkmate
- A check that cannot be answered. The game ends immediately, and the player whose king is mated loses.
- Stalemate
- No legal move available, but the king is not in check. The game is drawn.
- Material
- The pieces you have on the board. "Ahead on material" means you have more or better ones.
The setup
Eight rows, eight columns, sixty-four squares. Each player starts with eight pawns on their second row, and behind them: rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, bishop, knight, rook. Two checks that catch everyone out the first time —
- A light square goes in the near right-hand corner for both players.
- The queen starts on her own colour. White’s queen on a light square, Black’s on a dark one, facing each other down the same file. If the queen and king are the wrong way round, the whole game will feel subtly strange.
White always moves first, and then the players alternate. You must move on your turn: passing is not allowed in chess.
How each piece moves
- King — one square in any direction, including diagonally. He may never move onto a square where he would be attacked.
- Queen — any number of squares in a straight line: along a rank, along a file, or diagonally. She cannot jump over anything.
- Rook — any number of squares along a rank or file.
- Bishop — any number of squares diagonally. Each bishop stays on the colour of square it started on for the whole game.
- Knight — two squares along a rank or file and then one square at right angles, landing on a square of the opposite colour to the one it left. The knight is the only man that jumps: whatever stands between its start and finish is irrelevant.
- Pawn — one square straight forward, or two squares on its first move only, and never backwards. It captures differently from the way it moves: one square diagonally forward. A pawn cannot capture the piece standing directly in front of it, and a pawn blocked by any piece cannot move at all.
The three special moves
Castling. The king moves two squares towards one of his rooks, and that rook jumps over him to the square he crossed. It is the only move in which two pieces move at once, and it is the normal way of getting the king off the centre of the board. It is legal only when all of the following are true: that king has never moved, that rook has never moved, every square between them is empty, the king is not in check, and neither the square he crosses nor the square he lands on is attacked by an enemy piece. Castling out of, through, or into check is illegal.
En passant — French for “in passing”. If a pawn uses its two-square opening move to slip past a square that an enemy pawn was attacking, that enemy pawn may capture it anyway, moving diagonally into the square the pawn skipped. The right lasts for exactly one move. Miss it and it is gone.
Promotion. A pawn that reaches the far rank must immediately become a queen, rook, bishop or knight of its own colour. You may have two queens, or three, and you may choose a knight if a knight does the job better. You cannot promote to a king and you cannot decline.
How a game ends
- Checkmate. The king is attacked and nothing can be done about it. The game ends there and the attacker wins.
- Resignation. A player who can see they are losing may resign. The Resign button asks once before it counts.
- Stalemate. The player to move is not in check and has no legal move at all. Drawn.
- Threefold repetition. The same position, with the same side to move and the same rights, has arisen three times. Drawn.
- The fifty-move rule. Fifty moves by each player with no capture and no pawn moved. Drawn.
- Insufficient material. Neither side has enough left to force mate — king against king, king and one bishop or knight against king, or bishops all on the same colour of square. Drawn. Two knights are deliberately not on that list: mate cannot be forced with them, but it can be reached, so the game goes on.
Playing on this board
Tap or click a piece and its legal destinations appear as dots, with a ring for a capture. Illegal moves are never offered, which means you cannot leave your own king in check by accident, and you cannot castle when the rules forbid it. Check is announced in words as well as colour, and the game says which ending finished it rather than simply stopping.
Takeback undoes your move and the computer’s reply together, so it is your turn again in the position you were thinking about. Play as chooses White or Black, and the level control from 1 to 5 can be changed at any time — it takes effect on the computer’s next move. The move list beside the board is written in standard algebraic notation, the same notation every chess book uses, which makes it a decent way to start reading one.
What the five levels change
Level 1 searches two moves ahead and plays a deliberately loose move about two times in five. Level 2 searches three and is loose about one time in seven. Level 3 searches three and plays them straight. Levels 4 and 5 search four and five moves and then carry on looking at captures past the end of that search, which is what stops an engine grabbing a pawn and losing a bishop two moves later. Every level plays a forced mate when it has one — sloppiness is a matter of judgement in a normal position, never of throwing away a won game.
Where these rules come from
The rules on this page are the standard game, as laid down in the FIDE Laws of
Chess, and every one of them was checked against the code that runs the board:
move generation, castling rights, en passant, promotion and the four drawing
rules live in our chess engine’s position.ts and game.ts. That move generator
is verified by counting every legal sequence from the standard test positions
used across chess programming — including the one known as Kiwipete, which exists
precisely because castling and pinned pieces are where engines get it wrong. If
you find a position this board handles incorrectly, tell us and it
gets a test written for it.