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Kontest

Chess

The full game, every rule, with clocks from bullet to a day a move.

Players
2
Skill
All skill, no luck
Usual length
10 to 40 minutes

The goal

Checkmate the other king: attack it so that it has no way out. White moves first, and on Kontest the first player of a series takes white in game one. Colours swap every game.

The starting position. White sits at the bottom, with a light square in each player’s right-hand corner.

How the pieces move

  • King: one square any way. Never into check.
  • Queen: any distance along a row, a column or a diagonal.
  • Rook: any distance along a row or column.
  • Bishop: any distance diagonally, so always on one colour.
  • Knight: an L, two squares then one across. The only piece that jumps.
  • Pawn: one square forward, or two on its first move. It captures one square diagonally forward.

Pick up a piece and the board shows every square it can legally go to. Try it:

Play both sides. Tap a piece, then where it goes.

Check and checkmate

A king under attack is in check, and the move after it must get out of check: move the king, block the line, or take the attacker. When nothing does, it is checkmate and the game is over. Here is the quickest trap there is, the scholar’s mate:

The start.

The special moves

Castling. Once a game, the king moves two squares towards a rook and the rook jumps over it. Neither may have moved before, the squares between must be empty, and the king may not be in check, pass through check, or land in it.

King and rook have not moved, and the squares between them are empty.

En passant. A pawn that moves two squares can be taken as if it had moved one, by a pawn standing beside it, on the very next move only.

White’s pawn has reached e5.

Promotion. A pawn that reaches the far side becomes a queen. (Kontest promotes to a queen every time, which is almost always what you want.)

One square from the end.

Draws

  • Stalemate: the player to move is not in check and has no legal move.
  • Agreement: one player offers a draw, the other accepts.
  • Threefold repetition: the same position three times.
  • Fifty moves each without a capture or a pawn move.
  • Not enough material left for anyone to checkmate, such as king against king.
Black to move. The king is not in check, but every square it could go to is covered. No legal move: stalemate, a draw.

On Kontest

Series. A game can be one game or a best of 3, 5 or 7: a win is a point, a draw half each, and the first past half wins the match. Who moves first swaps every game, against KBot too.

Start between games. After each game both players press Start for the next. You have the clock’s base time to do it (3 minutes on 3 + 2, an hour on an hour a move). Not pressing in time loses that game. If nobody presses Start, the match ends there: the leader wins it, and a level score is a draw.

Clocks. Either a time per move (from a minute to a day), or a time for the whole game, with or without an increment added after each move (“3 + 2” is three minutes each plus two seconds a move). Run out and you lose. The default is an hour a move.

Draws and resigning. You can offer a draw or resign at any time; in a series you choose whether it is for this game or the whole match, and the other player sees which. At a table of three or more you leave instead: you’re placed last, and the rest play on.

KBot. In your own chat you can play KBot, on Normal (it plays properly) or Easy (it makes mistakes). Games against KBot don’t count towards your stats or the leaderboards.

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