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Chess for two: a board that knows the rules

A chess board for two people. Sit at one screen, pass a phone back and forth, or send a link after each move to someone far away. The page knows the rules: it shows where a piece can go, will not make a move the rules do not allow, and says when it is check, checkmate or a draw. There is no computer opponent, no clock, no account and no ads. Two people, and a game.

Private by design. The game is kept in one place only: the address of this page, after the # sign. Browsers do not send that part of an address to a website, so your moves never reach us. Nothing is saved on this device and nothing is sent. Whoever has the link can see the game and move in it, so send it only to the person you are playing. This page runs no analytics or tracking. How we handle privacy.

The rules, in plain words

How each piece moves

King: one square in any direction. It may never step onto a square where it could be captured.
Queen: any number of squares in a straight line: along a row, up or down a column, or along a diagonal.
Rook: any number of squares along a row or a column.
Bishop: any number of squares along a diagonal. It stays on squares of one color for the whole game.
Knight: an L shape: two squares one way and then one square to the side. It is the only piece that jumps over others.
Pawn: one square straight ahead, or two from the square it starts on. It never goes backward. It captures one square diagonally ahead, and only that way.
A piece captures by landing on the square of an enemy piece, which comes off the board. Nobody may capture their own piece.

Three special moves

Castling. Once in a game, the king may move two squares toward one of its rooks, and that rook goes to the square the king passed over. It is allowed only when neither the king nor that rook has moved yet, the squares between them are empty, the king is not in check, and the king does not pass over or land on a square that is attacked. On this board: pick up the king and press the square two to the side.
En passant. When a pawn moves two squares and lands beside an enemy pawn, that enemy pawn may capture it as if it had moved only one square. It has to be done on the very next move, or not at all.
Promotion. A pawn that reaches the far side of the board becomes a queen, a rook, a bishop or a knight. The player chooses; the page asks.

How a game ends

Check: a king is attacked. The player has to get out of it at once: move the king, put a piece in the way, or capture the attacker.
Checkmate: the king is in check and no move gets it out. The game is over, and the other player wins.
Stalemate: the player to move is not in check but has no move the rules allow. The game is a draw: nobody wins.
Not enough pieces: a draw when neither side could ever give checkmate. The page calls this for king against king, for a king and one bishop or one knight against a king, and for kings with bishops that all stand on one color.
The same position three times, or fifty moves by each side with no pawn moved and nothing captured: a player may claim a draw. The page says when, and shows a button; you may also play on.
The two players may agree to a draw at any time, and a player may give up. The page has no button for those: say it out loud and press “New game”.

Playing with someone far away

Make your move, then press “Copy a link to this game” and send the link by text, email or any messenger.
The other person opens the link, sees the board as you left it, makes a move, and sends their link back.
It is not live: a move does not show up on the other screen by itself. The newest link is the game.
The page cannot know who made a move. Anyone holding a link can move for either side, or take a move back.
Who plays White? Pick for us can toss a coin.

How the rules were checked

Chess programmers test their rules by counting: from a set position, how many different games are possible a few moves deep? The counts are published, and a program with even one rule wrong gets a different number.
Each time this page is built, a program counts the games this page would allow from six test positions, 500,117 in all, and the build stops unless every count equals the published one.
The counts are from Perft Results on the Chess Programming Wiki, fetched on October 13, 2026. Scarlet Beast has no tie to that wiki.
The same program also plays through a few well-known short games and checks the checkmate, the stalemate, the castling, the en passant capture and the way each move is written.
That test covers which moves are allowed. The draw rules and the wording on this page were not checked by a chess arbiter.

What this page can’t do

It does not play. There is no computer opponent and no AI in it, and it never suggests a move. The marks show where a piece is allowed to go, not whether going there is wise.
It does not keep your game. The game lives in the address of the page. If the page is closed and the link is lost, the game is gone, and we cannot give it back, because we never had it.
It has no clock, no rating and no list of players.
It does not end a game by itself for repeated positions or the fifty-move rule. It tells you a draw may be claimed and leaves it to the players.
The pieces are plain shapes drawn by the page, not letters of a font, so they are the same on every device. They are our own drawings, made with AI: they are not a photograph of a set, and a king or a knight may not look just like the one in your box.
It is not an official rulebook. For a tournament, the organizer’s rules decide; the international chess federation, FIDE, publishes the Laws of Chess.
It was tried by a program in one browser, with a mouse and a keyboard. It has not been tried on a touch screen or with a screen reader.

Pages that go with this

Checkers for two: the same kind of board, for checkers.
Reversi for two: the same kind of board, for reversi.
Four in a row for two: the same kind of board, for four in a row.
Pick for us: a coin, dice, or a name out of a hat, to decide who plays White.
Visual timer: if you want a time limit for a move.
Sudoku: a puzzle for one.
Piano: seventeen keys and seven things to learn.
All the free tools, and how to save them on your phone.

A game, and nothing more. A game can be good company in a long hour, and it cannot do more than that. If things are heavier than a game can hold, Get help now lists people to call. If you are thinking about ending your life, call or text 988 (in the U.S.). If anyone is in danger, call 911.

The tool and the wording on this page were written with AI (Claude) for Scarlet Beast (our AI policy). There is no AI inside this tool: it knows the rules and nothing else, and it never picks a move. The rules are the standard rules of chess, explained here in our own words. It has been checked by a program, with a mouse and a keyboard in one browser; no person has read it through or played a game on it yet, and the Spanish of the page has not been read by a native speaker. It keeps nothing, so it has no line on My data on this device. Also in Spanish: Ajedrez para dos. Found a mistake? Email [email protected].