Chess is one of the oldest board games. It originated in the seventh century in India and was inspired by an old game called Chaturanga. It is still considered a royal game owing to its affinity with characters on the board and popularity among noble folks. The game involves a simulated battle of two armies, and the objective is to checkmate or capture the King of the opposite army.
You can play it casually without any timer with your family and friends. However, the competitions require you to play with timers and follow a specific set of rules. And that requires a lot of practice to become a competitive chess player.
Chess consists of a checkerboard with contrasting white and black squares where the battle of two armies occurs. Both armies have the same number of pawns, knights, rooks, bishops, a queen, and a king. You can choose between the two armies classified by color – white and black.
This turn-based game begins after the White Army makes the first move. Then, play continues based on the pieces’ position and the legality of their movements. Unless you’re playing competitively, there is no limit on the number of moves you can play. You’d eventually run out of moves if you didn’t aim to win.
Many erroneously label it as the game of the brilliant or super-intelligent folks. However, anyone who can grasp the gameplay can quickly learn and win a game with a good strategy. It’s crucial to employ a well-thought-out strategy to win a game of chess. Besides that, you’ll need to change it and adapt based on the tactics you employ to follow your long-term goal of beating the opponent. For example, if you rely solely on the tactical strategy of baiting your opponent to make mistakes, the game may not pan out in your favor. You might get lucky sometimes, but those tactics might soon lose the air.
Though the objective is to capture the opposition’s King, the game can also deemed a draw in different ways. Both players can mutually agree to call the game a draw. It can also happen when one player has no legitimate move left or can perform a checkmate on the opposition’s King. A game of chess consists of three phases – opening, middle game, and endgame. And you get to choose how you wish to move your pieces during each phase.
Over time, each phase spawned several different ways to conduct each phase. For instance, several opening theories have specific names based on how the first move or initial moves need to take place. Similar principles based on the position of the pieces on the board apply while in the middle game or endgame. It’s quite helpful to study chess theory literature besides practicing it physically to understand and master it. But what if you have to play chess with a computer?
Computing’s technological advances also birthed a novel way for humans to compete against computers, even in championships. Unlike us, computers consider the moves in chess in the form of a game tree. Based on the trials and errors of the moves, it devices the best possible tactics and strategies against a human player.
Over the years, the chess grandmasters also took up against the world’s most powerful supercomputers with immense processing power to calculate all possible alternatives and tactics. You must’ve heard the names of grandmasters such as Gary Kasprove and Vishwanathan Anand going against some of the powerful supercomputers in the past two decades. Owing to these incidents and the exciting gameplay style, several movies and TV shows about some of the most prolific male and female chess masters are available.
Today, you can play chess on your computer and even online with strangers. Also, you can participate in online chess championships anywhere in the world. While the original chess has fixed set pieces, the influence of pop culture has resulted in several iterations in terms of looks. Essentially, you still have to play chess; only the pieces of the armies would look different. You can even engage in something as wild as 4D chess, a sci-fiction trope based on using several 3D chess boards while including time as the fourth dimension.