Chess & mate

Chess is a board game that is played on an 8 by 8 (64) square board, with adjacent squares alternating black and white. It is a game for two players and the objective is to checkmate your opponent's King. Checkmate occurs when the opponent’s king is attacked and is unable to avoid capture with the next move.
Each player has a set of 16 pieces, a king, a queen, two knights (horses), two rooks (elephant), two bishops (camels) and eight pawns.

In ancient times, Chess was the game of the nobles & the kings, but is now played amongst all levels of society and all over the world. It is arguably the best game for improving mental dexterity and requires high levels of concentration and analysis. But it is very simple to understand & play and is a highly logical game; there are no complex moves and no tricks or secrets.

The ancients highly valued the skill of playing chess because it was and still is, one of the finest games of strategy and was thus an invaluable tool for a king to learn the art of warfare strategising. The game was probably derived from the battles of those times. If you notice, the layout and the chess-pieces are very much like the ancient Indian battles with camels, horses, elephants and infantry, with the king leading the army into the war with the objective of capturing or slaughtering the opposing king.

Chess was invented in India around the 6th century AD and has only been slightly modified; our ancestors would not have had much trouble in understanding the modern version of the game.

Shaturanga
‘Shaturanga’ was the earliest ancestor of the game of chess; also called ’Chaturanga’, it was said to have been invented by a 6th century Indian philosopher. The concept of the sixty-four squares was taken from an earlier game called ‘Ashtapada’, an ancient race game.
Shaturanga consisted of a battle between four armies, each under a Rajah (king) and had two players loosely aligning themselves against the remaining two. There were four types of pieces.
Infantry - four pawns, which moved one square forward and captured diagonally,
Ship – A ship that could move diagonally two squares at a time but could jump over intervening pieces,
Cavalry – A horse that moved like a Knight in Chess,
Elephants – An elephant that moved like a Rook in Chess,
And of course the Rajah, that moved like the King in modern Chess.

The game would start with the four armies in double rows in the four corners, the main pieces behind the infantry, as in Chess. The only other difference from Chess was the use of a dice to decide which piece could be moved. Each of the players moved in turn by rolling a rectangular dice, with its long sides marked 2, 3, 4 & 5.
2 was for the ships, 3 for the cavalry, 4 for the elephants and 5 for the rajah or the infantry.

Shatranj
Under the Hindu laws, gambling became forbidden and therefore the dice was taken off. Also the allied armies were merged to form a two-player game, with sixteen pieces each and one of the rajahs was converted into a Prime minister, and was made very weak, it could only move one step diagonally. Another modification was that the moves of the elephant and the ship were exchanged.
The game was called Shatranj and is quite close to the modern game of chess.

Shatranj moved to Persia close to 500 AD, and reached the Arab Kingdoms by 650 AD, it then moved swiftly to Greece, Mecca and Medina. Around 760 AD, it reached Europe, although there are various versions as to how it did so.

Chess in Asia
The game virtually remained in the same form, but took on different variations in different places. Some of the variants so formed were very exotic, for instance the Circular Chess and The Courier Game (extended Chess played on a board of 12 x 8). The game metamorphosed into Sittuyin in Burma, Shiang-Chi in Chinese Changgi in Korea, Sho-gi in Japan and Makruk in Thailand.

European Chess
The modern form of chess originated in Europe around the 15th century. Most of the current rules like en passant, castling, ‘two square pawn advance’ on the first move as well as the increase in the powers of certain pieces was carried out then. Important changes were conversion of the prime minister to the very powerful queen and un-restraining the bishop’s diagonal movement from the then two squares.

Chess-pieces
Up until the middle of the 19th century, the rich used very delicate & expensively crafted chess pieces, but which were very cumbersome to use at times, while the rest of the people used pieces of wood, with only their heights to differentiate the various pieces. But in 1847, John Jaques, a Londoner, created a design that had the best of both worlds. It had easily distinguishable pieces, while still retaining the height differentiations and thus everyone was happy.
Over the years, John Jaques’ designs have been modified slightly so that the pieces would be more robust and could be mass-produced more conveniently.