Smalltalk Ninja Board Games All games

Chess

India, by way of Persia. It was the first game on this site.

Who moves first?

You don't need an account or an email, and there's nothing to install. You'll get a link to send to the person you want to play.

How to play

The board

The board is eight squares by eight, and each side has sixteen pieces. White moves first.
Each side has a king, a queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights and eight pawns.

How the pieces move

The rook moves any distance in a straight line. The bishop moves any distance diagonally. The queen does both.
The knight jumps in an L shape, and is the only piece that passes over others.
The king moves one square in any direction.
Nothing except the knight may move through a piece of either colour.

Pawns

A pawn steps one square forward, or two squares from its starting row.
It captures one square diagonally forward, never straight ahead.
A pawn that has just stepped two squares can be taken as though it had stepped one. This is en passant, and it is only legal on the very next turn.
A pawn that reaches the far rank becomes a queen, rook, bishop or knight. You choose which.

Castling

Once in a game each side may move the king two squares towards a rook, and the rook jumps to the far side of it.
Neither piece may have moved before, and the squares between them must be empty.
The king may not castle out of check, through an attacked square, or into one.

Winning

You win by checkmate: the enemy king is under attack and there is no move that saves it.
You may never make a move that leaves your own king in check.

Draws

If you have no legal move and you're not in check, that's stalemate. The game is a draw, not a loss.
If each side makes fifty moves with no capture and no pawn move, the game is a draw.
Either player may offer a draw at any time.

Which rules do we use?

This is ordinary chess. The pieces, castling, en passant, promotion and the fifty-move rule all work the way they do on a real board.

Chess has one set of rules, and everyone plays by it.

We do too, except for one rule that we leave out on purpose.

Threefold repetition: Reaching the same position three times doesn't end the game here. To check for it, we'd need the whole history of the game, and we only keep the position on the board.

This rarely matters. The fifty-move rule still ends an endgame where nothing happens, and either player can offer a draw at any time.

Everything else follows the rules played everywhere.

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