Chess

Chess is a two player strategy board game played on an eight by eight grid, in which each player commands sixteen pieces with distinct powers of movement and aims to checkmate the opposing king. The game descends from chaturanga, documented in northern India by around the sixth or seventh century AD, from which it spread west into Persia as shatranj and then into the Islamic world and medieval Europe. The modern rules, including the powerful queen and long range bishop moves that replaced weaker earlier pieces, emerged in southern Europe, most likely Spain, in the late fifteenth century. H.J.R. Murray 1913 A History of Chess remains the foundational academic study of this lineage, though it has been refined by later scholarship on the game earliest Indian sources.