Explore chess
Chess through time
Fifteen hundred years, twelve moments, and one rule change that mattered more than all the others. Every date here is approximate where the record is genuinely approximate.
Around the 6th centuryNorthern India
Four parts of an army
The ancestor of chess is chaturanga, a game whose name refers to the four divisions of an army: foot soldiers, horses, elephants and chariots. Those four are still on the board. They became the pawn, the knight, the bishop and the rook.
From the 7th centuryPersia
Where the word checkmate comes from
The game travelled west and became shatranj. A player warned the opponent by calling out shah, meaning king. When the king could not escape at all, the phrase was shah mat. English took that whole phrase and turned it into checkmate.
8th to 11th centuryNorth Africa, Spain, Sicily
Into Europe
Chess spread along the trade and conquest routes of the Islamic world and crossed into Europe through Spain and Sicily. It arrived as a slow, careful game and stayed that way for several hundred years.
Medieval EuropeAcross the continent
The queen who could barely move
For centuries the piece we call the queen was an advisor who moved one square diagonally, and the bishop was an elephant that jumped exactly two. Games took a very long time to get going, because almost nothing could reach across the board.
The same two pieces, on a board where the queen could only step one square at a time. Have a go, you can move these. The same two pieces, on a board where the queen could only step one square at a time. Squares of interest: c2, d2, e2.
Around 1475Valencia and southern Europe
The rule change that made modern chess
The queen was given the long diagonal and straight moves she has now, and the bishop was given the full diagonal. The earliest known description of the new rules is a Valencian poem, Scachs d'amor. The faster game spread across Europe within a couple of generations and the old one disappeared. Every game played today descends from that change.
The same position after the change. One piece now touches most of the board. Have a go, you can move these. The same position after the change. One piece now touches most of the board. Squares of interest: d2, d3, d4, d5, d6, d7, d8, c1, b1, a1, e2, f3, g4, h5, c2, b3, a4.
1749London and Paris
Pawns get taken seriously
François-André Danican Philidor published an analysis of the game arguing that pawns were not filler but the thing that decided positions. It is the first widely read book to treat chess as something with underlying principles rather than a collection of tricks.
1849London
Why every chess set looks the same
A new pattern of pieces went on sale in London, endorsed by the leading English player Howard Staunton. Before it, sets varied so much that players had to agree which piece was which. The Staunton pattern won, and it is still the shape of the pieces in every tournament and every school hall.
1851London
The first international tournament
Players came from across Europe to a knockout event held alongside the Great Exhibition. It is the start of organised competitive chess as something separate from playing for money in coffee houses.
1886United States
The first World Champion
Wilhelm Steinitz beat Johannes Zukertort in a match both players agreed was for the world title. Steinitz is also the player who argued that chess could be understood through general principles rather than only through calculation, which is roughly the argument every chess teacher still makes.
1924Paris
One set of rules for everyone
Fédération Internationale des Échecs, FIDE, was founded to run international chess. It is why a child in a school hall in Dublin plays by exactly the same rules as a world championship match.
1997New York
The machine wins
IBM's Deep Blue beat the world champion Garry Kasparov in a six game match. People predicted it would kill interest in chess. The opposite happened: engines became the way almost everybody now studies the game.
TodayEverywhere, including this page
A whole engine in a web page
The engine you can play against on this site is a descendant of that work, compiled to run inside a browser tab. It is far stronger than Deep Blue was, it costs nothing, and it is downloaded only when somebody wants to play.
Why this is worth ten minutes of a school day
The pieces on the board in front of a 3rd Class pupil are an Indian army. Persian speakers renamed them. Traders and armies carried them into Europe through Spain and Sicily. Somebody in Valencia rewrote the rules in the 1470s and the game we play today came out the other side.
A child who knows that is holding a piece of world history. It is a geography lesson and a history lesson attached to a game they already want to play.
How this fits into 3rd to 6th Class