Chess & Board Games Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which opening sees White follow a first move of the queen's pawn by offering the queen's bishop's pawn, tempting Black to grab it so that White can later build and dominate the centre, though the extra pawn is in practice almost impossible for Black to keep?

Question 2

Which Soviet electrical engineer, champion on and off from 1948 to 1963, is regarded as the patriarch of the Soviet school, a rigorous preparer who twice regained the title in a rematch after losing it, to Smyslov and then to Tal?

Question 3

Which four-player card game, played in two partnerships, opens with an auction to decide how many tricks a side will try to win and which suit if any is trumps, after which one hand is laid face up as the dummy and played by the partner?

Question 4

Which Norwegian became world champion in 2013 and held the title until 2023, reached the highest rating ever recorded, and then chose not to defend the crown again, saying he was no longer motivated by the classical match format?

Question 5

Which four-player tile game originating in 19th-century China has players draw and discard from a wall of 144 tiles, in suits of circles, bamboos and characters plus winds and dragons, racing to complete a hand of four sets and a pair?

Question 6

Which chess piece moves any distance in straight lines along the ranks and files, is worth about five pawns, starts in the corners, and is the piece the king jumps beside in the special two-piece move?

Question 7

Which reply to White's king's-pawn opening answers it by advancing the king's pawn only one square, preparing to challenge the centre with the queen's-bishop's pawn on the next move, at the cost of shutting in the queen's bishop behind the pawn chain?

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About Chess & Board Games

Chess is the most studied game ever devised, and this quiz sets it among the wider world of board games in eighty questions. Each describes a champion, an opening, a rule, a tactic, a piece, a rival game or a computer, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains the story, the record or the row behind it.

The first pack is the core: the game's origins in India and Persia; the champions Carlsen, Kasparov, Fischer and Steinitz; the 1972 Reykjavik match and the 1997 defeat of Kasparov by IBM's Deep Blue; the queen and the knight; checkmate, stalemate, castling, en passant and zugzwang; the fork and the pin; algebraic notation; the Sicilian Defence; the world body FIDE; and the Elo rating scale.

The second pack widens out. The champions from Lasker and Capablanca through Botvinnik, Karpov, Anand, Kramnik and Ding Liren, plus Judit Polgar and Paul Morphy. The openings, the Ruy Lopez, the Queen's Gambit, the King's Indian, the French, the fianchetto, Scholar's Mate and the gambit idea. The rules and terms, promotion, the touch-move rule, threefold repetition, blitz and the chess clock, the bishop, the rook, check and the combination. And the rest of the table: Go, backgammon, Scrabble, Monopoly, draughts, Xiangqi, Shogi, bridge, Texas hold'em, Othello, Catan, Diplomacy, Mahjong and Cluedo.

The third pack is history and controversy: the Indian ancestor chaturanga; the fraudulent automaton called the Turk; the Immortal Game and the young Fischer's Game of the Century; the self-taught program AlphaZero and the open-source engine Stockfish; the anti-draw Sofia rules; the Candidates Tournament; correspondence and simultaneous chess; the Chess Olympiad and the Women's World Championship; chess boxing; the 2006 bathroom-break row and the 2022 Carlsen-Niemann cheating affair; the seven-piece tablebase; Chess960; the pandemic-era boom; the composer-champion Philidor; and the in-between move called zwischenzug.

Every answer is a single name, and the three wrong options are always names of the same kind, so the game is recognition rather than recall. A few things get set straight: the Queen's Gambit is not really a gambit, since the pawn comes back; Karpov became champion in 1975 without playing a move; Alekhine is the only champion to have died with the title still his; and English draughts has been solved by computer and shown to be a draw with best play on both sides. The distractors are chosen to be tempting, always the right type of thing, so a shaky guess is easily punished. Because a diagram or a portrait almost always gives the answer away, images are used sparingly, only where a neutral photo of a set, a clock or a board in play reveals nothing, and every fact and date has been checked.