A chess game pits two armies, evenly matched, across a simple terrain. The aim of the game is simple: Capture and kill your opponent’s king, while protecting your own. But before you do that, you need to know how all of your pieces work.
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The General Rules of Chess
You’ll soon learn how each piece moves. But first, you must learn these simple rules:
The aim of the game is to capture your opponent’s king while keeping your own king from being captured.
White always makes the first move of the game.
The players move alternately. That is, first White moves, then Black moves, and so on.
Only one move can be made at a time. The way to make a move is to take one of your pieces and put it onto another square. When you have done that, your turn is over, and it’s your opponent’s turn.
Only one piece can ever occupy a square at one time. If one of your own pieces occupies a square, you cannot move another one of your pieces there.
If one of your opponent’s pieces occupies a square that you could move one of your pieces to, then you can move your piece to that square and take your opponent’s piece off the board at the same time. This is called capturing a piece. After a piece is captured, it can’t come back into the game. You don’t have to move a piece to a square that is occupied by your opponent’s piece, but if you do, capturing it is mandatory, not optional.
You must move when it is your turn, even when there are no good moves to be made.
Meet the Chessboard
The chessboard has 64 squares arranged in eight vertical rows (called files) and eight horizontal rows (called ranks). The squares alternate between one color and another, but no matter what the two colors, the squares are always referred to as “white” and “black.” to begin a game, the board must be placed so that the right corner square nearest each player is white.
A typical example of the chessboard diagram.
Naming the Squares
Each square on a chessboard has a specific name so that players can refer quickly and easily to where each piece is placed at any moment in a game.
Letters and numbers of the files and ranks.
The Rows
With the white corner in the bottom right of the chessboard, the vertical column of squares (the file) at the very left is called the a-file. The file to its right is called the b-file, and so on to the rightmost h-file. The horizontal row of squares (the rank) at the bottom of the diagram is numbered 1, and called the first rank. The one above it (number 2) is called the second rank, and so on to the topmost eighth rank.
The Squares
Each square is named by putting the letter of its file (column) next to the number of its rank (row). So for example, the bottom-right corner square is called “the h1 square,” or simply “h1” for short.
