Chess is the rare game where the whole position is visible, nothing is hidden, no dice are thrown — and it is still, after fifteen centuries of organised study, comfortably beyond anybody. Both players can see everything. That is exactly why losing stings: there is nobody to blame but the person who was looking at the same board you were.

It is also unusually forgiving of how much you want to invest. You can play it having learned the moves ten minutes ago and have a real game, or spend a lifetime on it and still be finding new ground. Very few games work at both ends of that range.

Where it comes from

The ancestor is chaturanga, played in northern India by about the sixth century, with pieces named for the four arms of an army: infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots. It travelled into Persia as shatranj — the words "check" and "checkmate" are worn-down Persian — and reached Europe through the Islamic world.

Then, in Spain and Italy in the late fifteenth century, somebody made the queen the strongest piece on the board. She had been almost useless, shuffling one square at a time; overnight she could cross the whole thing. The bishop was handed its long diagonal in the same reform, castling and the two-square pawn advance followed, and a slow contemplative game turned into a sharp one. Players at the time called the new version "mad queen chess", which tells you how it landed.

What this version does with it

Every rule is here, including the three that trip people up in casual games: castling with all its conditions, en passant, and underpromotion to something other than a queen. Draws by stalemate, repetition and insufficient material are all detected properly, because a game that quietly gets those wrong is not chess.

The opponent has three settings, and they differ in how far ahead it looks rather than in how much it cheats — Beginner will hang a piece, Hard will punish you for hanging one. It thinks on a background thread so the board stays responsive while it works. Round that you get a real clock if you want one (blitz, rapid, or increment time controls), a board that can flip between turns for pass-and-play across a table, and four square finishes from marble to plain because staring at the same wood for an hour is a choice, not a requirement.

Thirty seconds to start

• Tap a piece, then tap its destination — or just drag it. Legal squares light up.
• U takes a move back. F turns the board around.
• Hand the phone across the table for two players, or set the computer's level and colour before you start.

If you are coming back to it after years away

The advice that fixes most rusty players is unglamorous: get a couple of pawns into the middle, get your knights and bishops off the back rank, castle earlier than feels necessary, and leave the queen at home until the position asks for her. Then make a short survey a habit before every move: what can be checked, what can be taken, and what is being threatened — by you and by them. That one habit is worth more than any opening you could memorise, and the guide expands on all of it.

Read the full Chess guide  →

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