Board and setup
An 8×8 board; White moves first with a king, queen, rooks, bishops, knights and pawns.
Traditional / CHESS
Chess
Plan your attack on sixty-four squares while protecting your king.
Chess rewards careful opening play, sharp tactics and good timing — a game worth studying for years.
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CHESSABOUT THE GAME
About the game
Chess’s early forms are usually traced to ancient Indian games, which then spread through Persia and the Arab world into Europe, gradually settling into the pieces and rules familiar today.
With its 64-square board, pieces of differing powers, and the goal of checkmate, it has become a strategic language shared widely across the world.
Reference：www.britishmuseum.org ↗
Rules
Chess — How to play
Youzai Board Game Club — The server implementation governs play here; tournament and other site rules may differ.
Making a move
The king moves one square; queens, rooks and bishops slide; knights leap; pawns move forward and capture diagonally.
Winning and draws
A king in check with no escape is checkmated. No legal move without check is stalemate.
Rules on this site
Castling, en passant and promotion are supported. The server automatically handles threefold repetition, fifty-move draws and some insufficient-material cases.
Helpful examples
- The king moves one square in any direction; the queen slides orthogonally and diagonally; the rook slides orthogonally; the bishop slides diagonally; the knight makes an L-shaped move and is never blocked by pieces in between.
- A pawn normally advances one square, or two squares from its starting square, and captures one square diagonally forward. En passant is available on the move right after an enemy pawn advances two squares, under the usual conditions.
- Castling requires that the relevant castling right is still available, the path between king and rook is empty, and the king’s start, path and destination squares are all unattacked. A pawn reaching the last rank must choose a piece to promote to.
Complete beginner guide
From setup to the end of the game
Read these steps in order to complete your first game. This guide combines public rules with this site’s server implementation; where versions differ, this site’s ruling applies.
Setup and objective
White moves first. Each side has one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights and eight pawns. A king under attack is in check; if you cannot move the king, block the attack or capture the attacker, it is checkmate.
How pieces move
The knight can jump over other pieces; every other long-range piece is blocked by anything in its path. A pawn normally moves forward and captures diagonally, and may advance two squares from its starting square.
Special moves
In castling, the king moves two squares toward a rook and the rook jumps to the square the king crossed; both the path and the squares involved must be unattacked, and neither piece may have moved before. En passant is only legal on the move right after an enemy pawn advances two squares. A pawn reaching the last rank must promote.
Draws on this site
A player with no legal move who is not in check is stalemated, which is a draw. This site also automatically applies threefold repetition, the fifty-move rule without a pawn move or capture, and some insufficient-material cases — these automatic rulings do not exactly match the claim procedures used in official tournaments.
General rules reference：handbook.fide.com ↗