Chess & Board Games Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

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 2

What is the name for the tactic in which a single chess piece attacks two or more enemy pieces at the same time, so that the opponent can save only one of them?

Question 3

Which opening, the most popular reply in master play to White's first move of the king's pawn two squares, answers it by advancing the queen's bishop's pawn two squares instead of meeting it head on, aiming for an unbalanced fight where Black plays for a win rather than equality?

Question 4

What is the name of the only chess move that shifts two of a player's own pieces in one turn, sending the king two squares toward a corner rook while that rook hops to the king's other side, used to tuck the king into safety and connect the rooks?

Question 5

Which word game, devised by an out-of-work American architect during the Depression and sold from 1948, has players draw lettered tiles from a bag and lay them in crossing rows on a 15 by 15 grid, scoring by letter values and premium squares?

Question 6

Which event, sitting one step below the world title itself, brings together a small field of the top qualifiers, these days eight players in a double round-robin, to produce the single challenger who will face the reigning world champion?

Question 7

What is the name of the game played in India by about the 6th century that is the common ancestor of chess and several related games, its name meaning 'four limbs' for the four arms of an ancient army, infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots?

Question 8

What is the term for a direct attack on the king that the defender must deal with immediately, by capturing the attacker, blocking the line, or moving the king, and cannot legally ignore?

Question 9

Which German term, literally 'in-between move', names the tactic of interrupting an expected sequence, most often a recapture, with a surprising forcing move such as a check or a threat, and only then returning to the original idea on improved terms?

Question 10

Which Soviet player became champion in 1975 without playing a move, when Bobby Fischer refused the terms to defend, and then justified the title over a decade with a python-like positional style that slowly squeezed opponents to death?

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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.