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A friendly, optional tour: how each piece moves, a little lore, and a few stories. Every story folds away, and you can leave any time.
The board has a light square in each player's bottom-right corner. Rooks go in the corners, then knights, then bishops. The queen goes on her own color (white queen on a light square, black queen on a dark one), the king beside her, and the pawns fill the row in front.
Castling: the king slides two squares toward a rook and the rook hops over to the other side of him. It tucks the king away and wakes the rook up. It is allowed only if neither piece has moved, nothing stands between them, and the king is not in check, does not pass through check and does not land in check.
En passant (French for "in passing"): if an enemy pawn leaps two squares and lands right beside your pawn, you may capture it as if it had moved only one, but only on your very next move.
Promotion: a pawn that reaches the far side turns into a queen, rook, bishop or knight. Almost everyone picks a queen.
Check means a king is under attack and must escape. Checkmate means he cannot, and the game is over. A draw happens when it is a stalemate (the player to move is not in check but has no legal move), when neither side can possibly mate, when the same position repeats three times, or when both players agree.
An old legend says the inventor of chess so delighted his king that he was offered any reward. He asked for one grain of wheat on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, doubling on every square. The king laughed at the modest request. By the 64th square the total would be about 18 quintillion grains, far more than has ever been grown. It is a legend, not history, but it is the classic way to feel how fast doubling grows.
For centuries the queen was a weak adviser who crept one square diagonally. Around the year 1500, in Spain and Italy, the rules changed and she became the most powerful piece on the board, which made games faster and sharper. Players called the new game "mad queen chess." Some historians link it to the era's strong queens, though nobody knows for sure. The old slow game faded away.
In 1997 an IBM computer called Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match, the first time a computer won a match against a reigning champion under tournament conditions. Today the chess engine on a phone is stronger than any human who has ever lived, and people still love the game.