Chess has a reputation for complexity, but the rulebook itself is small: six piece types, three special moves, and a handful of endings. You can learn everything on this page in fifteen minutes — and then spend as many years as you like discovering what it all means.
The board and the goal
Chess is played on an 8×8 board with a light square in each player's right-hand corner. White moves first, then turns alternate. The goal is checkmate: attack the enemy king so it cannot escape. You never actually capture the king — the game ends the moment escape is impossible.
How each piece moves
- Pawn — moves one square straight forward (two from its starting square), but captures one square diagonally forward. Pawns never move backwards. They're the only piece that captures differently from how it moves.
- Knight — the L-shape: two squares one way, then one square sideways. Knights are the only pieces that jump over anything in the way.
- Bishop — any distance diagonally. Each bishop lives its whole life on one colour.
- Rook — any distance horizontally or vertically.
- Queen — rook and bishop combined: any distance in any straight line. Your most powerful piece.
- King — one square in any direction. Modest, but the whole game revolves around him.
Pieces capture by landing on an enemy-occupied square; the captured piece leaves the board. You can never capture your own pieces, and (except the knight) pieces cannot pass through occupied squares.
The three special moves
Castling
Once per game, king and rook move together: the king slides two squares toward a rook, and that rook hops to the square the king crossed. Conditions: neither piece has moved before, the squares between are empty, and the king may not castle out of, through, or into check. Castle early — it's the fastest way to make your king safe.
En passant
If an enemy pawn advances two squares and lands directly beside your pawn, you may capture it "in passing" — diagonally forward onto the square it skipped — but only on the very next move. It exists so the two-square advance can't be used to sneak past enemy pawns.
Promotion
A pawn reaching the far side of the board immediately becomes a queen, rook, bishop, or knight — your choice, regardless of what's been captured. Nearly always choose the queen; very occasionally a knight (for an instant fork or mate) is better.
Check, checkmate, and getting out of trouble
When your king is attacked, you are in check and must fix it immediately, one of three ways: move the king, block the attack, or capture the attacker. If none of the three is possible, it's checkmate — game over. You may never make a move that leaves your own king in check.
All the ways a game can draw
- Stalemate — the player to move has no legal move but is not in check. A famous escape hatch for losing positions.
- Insufficient material — neither side can possibly mate (e.g. king vs king, or king and bishop vs king).
- Threefold repetition — the same position occurs three times.
- Fifty-move rule — fifty consecutive moves pass with no capture or pawn move.
- Agreement — both players simply shake hands.
Chess clocks, briefly
Competitive chess adds a clock: each player has a budget of time for the whole game, ticking only on their turn. Run out and you lose (with rare exceptions). On RivalPit you can play untimed or pick 1 to 30 minutes per side — 10 minutes is a friendly starting point that keeps games moving without panic.
Learning to actually play
Rules learned, the fastest route to competence is: play slowly, look at every check and capture available to both sides before moving, and follow basic opening principles — we wrote a whole guide to those. On RivalPit, legal moves light up when you pick up a piece, castling and en passant are handled for you, and the computer has three difficulty levels — Easy is patient with beginners, Hard is not.