Chess is a board game played between two opponents who move their pieces alternately on a chess board. The objective of each player is to place the opponent's king under attack in such a way that the opponent has no legal countermove.
The object of the game is to capture and to checkmate the opponent's king. The player, whose king has been checkmated, loses the game.
It is possible for the game to end with no king being captured, but those are special cases, which will be explained later
Chess pieces
The chess board
The chess board There are sixty-four (64) squares on a Chessboard.
If you play the white pieces, the letters (files) are sorted by alphabetical order: A - H.
If you play the black pieces, the letters are sorted in reverse alphabetical order: H - A.
The numbers on the side of the board are called ranks.
If you play the white pieces, they are counted upwards: 1 - 8.
If you play the black pieces, they are counted downwards: 8 - 1.
The King
The king can be moved two different ways:


* To any adjoining square, which is not attacked by one or more of the opponent's pieces.


*
Castling ? the king is transferred from its initial square two or three squares towards the rook, then that rook is transferred to the square the king has just crossed.
Castling must be the first move of the king and the rook of the same color and on the same ranks.
Castling is the only situation where two pieces move at the same time. Castling cannot be made if the king is under attack.
If there are pieces between the rook and the king, the castling is temporarily prevented.

The Queen
The Queen can be moved to any square along the file, the rank or the diagonal it stands on and it cannot skip over intervening pieces. The Queen can control larger number of squares than any other chess piece, making it the most powerful piece on the board.
The Bishop
The bishop can be moved to any square along the diagonal line it stands on.
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