Two players, a board of 8 × 8 squares, 16 pieces each. The target is the opposing king: attack him so that the attack cannot be answered and you have delivered checkmate and won.
You can play on your own against the computer (in three strengths) or with someone else from the lobby. A game takes ten to forty minutes — it is the longest game in the duel corner.
All the rules are built: castling, en passant, promotion, check, checkmate, stalemate and all five kinds of draw.
The board is placed so that the square in the bottom right is light. On the back rank, from left to right: rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, bishop, knight, rook. In front of them, eight pawns.
⭐ The way to remember the queen: the queen stands on her own colour. The white queen on a light square, the black one on a dark square. If that is not the case, you have swapped king and queen.
White starts. After that the two sides move in turn.
The light squares are sandstone, the dark ones walnut; White plays in ivory, Black in ebony. The coordinates a–h and 1–8 stand in the edge squares — squares are named after them (the one at the bottom left is a1).
Capturing means moving onto a square occupied by an enemy piece and taking it off the board. You can never move through one of your own pieces (except with the knight), and never onto a square occupied by one.
If your king is attacked, he is in check. The game says so clearly: the status line turns red and reads “⚠️ Check!”, and a red glow flashes once around the threatened king.
In check you must answer it. There are exactly three ways:
If none of the three is possible, it is checkmate — the game is lost. Moves that do not answer the check are not offered at all, and the game tells you why.
⚠️ A move that leaves your own king in check is never allowed — not even by accident. That is why a piece standing in front of your king sometimes cannot move at all: it is pinned. Tap it and the game will tell you.
1. Castling. King and rook move in one move: the king goes two squares towards the rook, and the rook jumps over him onto the square beside him. It is only allowed if every condition holds:
⭐ When castling long, the square next to the rook may well be attacked — the king never sets foot on it. And if you lose your rook, the castling right on that side goes with it.
How to do it: tap the king and then the square two steps away. The rook comes along on its own.
2. En passant (“in passing”). If an enemy pawn moves two squares from its starting square and lands beside your pawn, you may capture it as if it had moved only one: you move diagonally onto the square it skipped, and his pawn comes off the board.
⚠️ Only on your very next move. Do something else first and the chance is gone for good.
3. Promotion. A pawn reaching the last rank is turned into another piece — queen, rook, bishop or knight, your free choice. You will be asked: a window shows the four pieces and you tap one.
⭐ You may have several queens. And sometimes the knight is the better choice — it is the one piece a queen cannot replace.
Not every game has a winner. All five kinds are built:
⚠️ The first four happen by themselves. There is nothing to press and nothing to claim: as soon as one of them occurs, the game is over, and the closing window says which one it was.
Offering a draw only works with two players, and only while it is your turn — before your move. The button “🤝 Offer a draw” then stands below the board. Your opponent sees the offer immediately and can accept or decline.
⚠️ An offer expires with the next move. Once a move is played it is gone — you would have to ask again. And after a refusal there is quiet until a move is actually made: nobody should knock at the door every few seconds.
⛔ There are no draw offers on your own. The computer will not accept one — that would only be a button that does nothing.
You can resign at any time. That button belongs to the table and sits in the same place in every game of the duel corner.
The computer opponent calculates in the background so that you can keep scrolling while it thinks. Above the board you can see how deep it is currently searching.
The strength applies from the next game — a game in progress still counts for the level it started with.
Two steps, always the same: tap a piece — every square it may go to lights up — tap the target square.
⭐ A green dot means “empty square”, a red ring means “something to capture here”. Two different marks, not just two colours — so it works for people who tell colours apart poorly.
A slip never costs you the move. Tap the same piece again and the selection is gone. Tap another of your pieces and it switches. Tap anywhere else and the game tells you the reason. The Esc key works too.
The piece that moved last leaves a copper trace on both of its squares — so you can see what happened even after a break.
Your own colour is always at the bottom. Use “🔄 Turn the board” to flip it if you are sharing one device.
Below the board there is the move list, above and below it the captured pieces of both sides.
Only games against other players count. A win is worth 10 points, a draw 4, taking part 1 — the same numbers as in every game of the duel corner.
There are five milestones, and every one of them is a level: first game against another player · first win · played against three different people · five wins · twenty-five wins.
⚠️ Playing on your own does not count towards them. It is practice, and your practice record is still kept — you find it under 📊 Statistics, clearly separated.
When you play on your own, only the result is saved, not the position. If you close the page in the middle of a game, you start again.
⚠️ With two players it is different: the position lives on the server. You can close the page and carry on from another device — as long as the move clock is running.
Chess runs entirely on your device: the rules and the computer opponent are calculated in the browser, nothing goes online for that. Once you have opened the game with a connection, you can start it without one afterwards — on a train, on a plane, in a basement.
⚠️ The computer opponent is, at around half a megabyte, the largest file in the whole arcade. It is therefore loaded only when you first open the game, not in advance — if you never play chess, you never get it.
Your results are kept on the device and sent on automatically as soon as you are online again. The lobby naturally needs a connection.
Above the board there are two buttons: on your own and two players. Tapping two players opens a table right away — the page does not change.
While the table is open, nothing is set up: the board stays empty, and above it you can read how many seats are taken. The game only begins once both of you are there. A seat nobody is sitting on says “🪑 free” — the computer never joins by itself.
⭐ Who plays White is drawn when the game begins. Your own colour is at the bottom afterwards.
Everything else — the table code, inviting somebody, the call back to the table, the move clock, the chat and the scoring — works exactly as in every other game of the duel corner. It is described in detail in the guide 🎯 Duel corner.
Almost everything in this arcade is written by hand. Chess adds two free libraries: one for the rules, one as the computer opponent. Both are free software and are used within the terms of their licences.
Their full licence texts, the authors and the sources are on the page Software used.
⛔ There is no tracking, no advertising and no external server involved — both files are served from this site itself.