Chess and Strategy Games

What this quiz asks

• How many of these pieces does each player have at the start of a chess game?
• Chess is usually traced back to chaturanga, a game played around the 6th century in which country?
• The word "checkmate" comes from the Persian phrase "shah mat". What does "shah" mean?
• When a player castles, on either side of the board, how many squares does the king move?
• In chess, if the player to move has no legal move but is not in check, that player loses the game.
• In which city did Bobby Fischer defeat Boris Spassky to win the 1972 World Chess Championship?
• Select ALL of these world chess champions who were representing the Soviet Union when they won the title.
• Magnus Carlsen first became world chess champion in 2013 by beating which player in a match in Chennai?
• How many different legal first moves does White have at the very start of a chess game?
• In Chinese chess, known as xiangqi, what divides the board into two halves?
• Can a player claim a draw once both sides have made 50 moves in a row without any capture or pawn move?
• In Japanese shogi, what may a player do with an enemy piece they have captured?
• Order these players by the year they first became world chess champion, earliest first.
• In the board game Go, the player with the white stones always makes the first move.
• Which Hungarian player became a grandmaster in 1991 at the age of 15, younger than Bobby Fischer had been?
• Select ALL of these chess openings that begin with White's first move 1.e4.
• International draughts, very popular in the Netherlands, is played on a board with how many squares?
• Which 1992 Westwood Studios game set the template for the real-time strategy genre on computers?
• The first Karpov–Kasparov world title match, begun in 1984, was stopped without a result after how many games?
• Who won the first international chess tournament, held in London in 1851?