Guide

How to play

Everything you need to start a game, move the pieces and understand the rules, clocks and ratings.

Start a game

Open the game and press Menu:

• Quick pairing: pick a time control and you're paired with the next player looking for the same one.
• Play a friend: you get a private link. Send it to them and the game starts once they open it. Anyone else with the link can watch.
• Play the computer: Stockfish at four levels, Easy, Medium, Hard and Max.
• Pass and play: two players take turns on one screen.

You can sign in to keep a rating and a game history, or continue as a guest.

Using the 3D board

• Move a piece: click it, then click the square to move to. Legal squares light up.
• Look around: drag on the board to rotate the camera, scroll or pinch to zoom.
• Flip turns the board to the other side. In pass-and-play you can have it turn after every move.
• The ☰ button opens the move list, chat (in online games) and settings such as board themes and sound.

The rules in brief

White moves first and players take turns. The goal is to checkmate: attack the enemy king so that it has no way out.

• King: one square in any direction. It may never move into check.
• Queen: any distance along a row, column or diagonal.
• Rook: any distance along a row or column.
• Bishop: any distance along a diagonal.
• Knight: an L shape, two squares one way and one to the side. It jumps over other pieces.
• Pawn: one square forward, or two from its starting square, and captures one square diagonally forward.

Special moves

• Castling: the king moves two squares towards a rook and the rook jumps to its other side. Neither piece may have moved, the squares between must be empty, and the king may not be in check, pass through check or land in check.
• En passant: when a pawn moves two squares and lands beside an enemy pawn, that pawn may capture it as if it had moved one square, but only on the very next move.
• Promotion: a pawn reaching the last row becomes a queen, rook, bishop or knight. You choose.

How a game ends

• Checkmate wins. So does your opponent resigning or running out of time, unless you don't have enough pieces left to ever checkmate, in which case it's a draw.
• Stalemate (no legal move but not in check) and insufficient material are draws straight away.
• Threefold repetition and the fifty-move rule (fifty moves each with no capture or pawn move) let either player claim a draw with the Claim draw button. Play continues until someone does.
• Fivefold repetition and the 75-move rule end the game as a draw automatically, as in FIDE rules.
• You can offer a draw, and your opponent can accept or decline.
• If a player doesn't make their first move within 30 seconds, the game is aborted: no result and no rating change.

Time controls

Each player has their own clock, which runs only on their turn. "3+2" means 3 minutes each, plus 2 seconds added after every move.

• Bullet: 1+0
• Blitz: 3+2 and 5+3
• Rapid: 10+0 and 15+10
• No clock: take as long as you like.

Ratings

Signed-in players have a rating, calculated with the Glicko-2 system, as used by many chess sites. Everyone starts at 1500. A ? after a rating means it is still provisional: it moves quickly until you've played a few rated games.

To keep ratings fair, some games are played unrated: games with a guest, games between two accounts on the same network, and more than three games a day between the same two players.

See where you stand on the leaderboard.