Outsmart the board in Chess
White to move
Promote to
Chess is the timeless two-army duel of pure skill: every piece moves a different way, nothing is hidden, and the entire game turns on the plans you can see and your opponent can't. Develop your pieces, control the centre, keep your king safe, and corner the enemy king with no escape — checkmate — to win.
How to play
Chess in 4 steps
Move a piece
Click or tap one of your pieces to see every square it can legally reach, highlighted on the board, then tap a target to move there.
Capture the enemy
Land on a square holding an opponent's piece to capture it and remove it from the board. Each piece moves its own way — pawns forward, bishops diagonally, the queen anywhere.
Answer every check
When your king is attacked you are in check and must escape it — block, capture the attacker, or move the king. You can never leave your own king in check.
Deliver checkmate
Attack the enemy king so it cannot escape, block, or capture its way out. That's checkmate and the game is yours. No legal move with the king safe is stalemate — a draw.
Controls
- Click / Tap a piece
- Select it and highlight its legal moves
- Click / Tap a square
- Move the selected piece there
- Mode buttons
- Switch between 2-player and AI difficulties
- U
- Undo the last move
- R
- Start a new game
Strategy
Tips to play better
Control the centre
The four central squares are the high ground — pieces there hit more of the board. Open with a centre pawn (e4 or d4) and fight for the middle from move one.
Develop, then attack
Get your knights and bishops off the back rank early before launching anything. A lead in development — more pieces in play — is worth more than a grabbed pawn.
Castle your king to safety
Castling tucks your king behind a wall of pawns and connects your rooks. Do it early; a king stuck in the centre is a target.
Don't hang pieces
Before every move, check what your opponent threatens. The most common way to lose is leaving a piece undefended where it can simply be taken for free.
About Chess
Chess descends from the 6th-century Indian game chaturanga, spread through Persia and the Islamic world, and took its modern form in Europe around 1475 when the queen and bishop gained their long-range powers. Today it is the most-studied game ever devised, with a deep theory of openings, tactics and endgames and a worldwide following that exploded online in the 2020s.
The rules are finite but the game is effectively bottomless: there are more possible chess games than atoms in the observable universe. That tension — simple moves, unfathomable depth — is why chess has been the benchmark of game-playing intelligence for centuries, from the 18th-century Mechanical Turk to IBM's Deep Blue beating world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
This version implements the full laws of chess — castling on both sides, en passant captures and pawn promotion — with strict legal-move generation so you can never move into check. The computer opponent uses a minimax search with alpha-beta pruning and piece-square evaluation, playing a quick, casual game on Easy and looking several moves ahead on Hard. The pieces are rendered as crisp monochrome Unicode glyphs (♚♛♜♝♞♟) — no images, just type.
FAQ
Chess questions
Is this chess really free?
How strong is the computer?
Are castling, en passant and promotion supported?
Can I play a friend on the same device?
Can I take back a move?
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