How to Play Chess - A Beginner's Rules Guide
Learning how to play chess is easier than it looks. Chess is a two player game on an eight by eight board. Each side starts with sixteen pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights and eight pawns. The goal is simple, checkmate, which means trapping the enemy king so it cannot escape capture. This guide walks through how to play chess from the first move to the final checkmate.
Chess has been played for around fifteen hundred years and is loved all over the world. Once you know how to play chess, you can sit down with anyone, in any country, and share a game. The rules below take about ten minutes to read and a single game to feel.
The Board and Starting Position
The board has sixty four squares, alternating light and dark. Ranks run one to eight and files run a to h. White always moves first. Set up your pieces on the first two ranks: rooks on the outside corners, knights next to them, bishops beside the knights, the queen on her own colour, and the king on the square that is left.
Make sure the board is turned so that a dark square is on each player's left, or the queen will start on the wrong colour. This tiny detail is the most common setup mistake for brand new players.
How Each Piece Moves
- Pawns move one square forward, or two from their starting square, and capture diagonally one square.
- Knights jump in an L shape, two squares then one, and they are the only pieces that can leap over other pieces.
- Bishops move any number of squares diagonally, but stay on their own colour for the whole game.
- Rooks move any number of squares in a straight line, along a file or a rank.
- The queen combines the rook and the bishop and moves any number of squares in a straight line.
- The king moves one square in any direction, and it is the piece you must never leave in danger.
A quick way to remember the value of each piece is to count in pawns: a knight or bishop is worth about three, a rook five, and a queen nine. That is why you usually give up the queen last, and why trading a rook for a bishop is often a mistake.
Check, Checkmate and Stalemate
If the enemy king is attacked, it is in check and must get out immediately. If the king cannot escape, is not defended, and no piece can block the attack, that is checkmate and the game ends. If the side to move is not in check but has no legal move, that is stalemate and the game is a draw.
You also need to know a few special rules. Castling moves the king two squares toward a rook, and you can do it once per side per game. En passant is a tricky pawn capture, and promotion happens when a pawn reaches the far rank and becomes a queen, a rook, a bishop or a knight.
Practise Before You Play
The best way to learn how to play chess is to move the pieces yourself. Use our unblocked chess board, set the difficulty to easy, and play a few short games while you check the rules above.
When the basics feel natural, work through our chess puzzles. They train you to spot forks, pins and checkmate nets, which are the patterns that decide most games. Each puzzle you solve is a tiny step toward seeing the board the way a strong player does.
If you would like a gentler start, play against the easy computer and let it make a few obvious mistakes. That gives you a chance to try the moves you just read about and to feel confident before you test yourself against a friend or a harder level.