People who look on the world as a game of chess deserve to lose

Chess is a two-player strategy board game played on a checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an 8×8 grid. The game is played by millions of people worldwide. Chess derived from the Indian game chaturanga sometime before the 7th century. The pieces assumed their current powers in Spain in the late 15th century; the modern rules were standardized in the 19th century.

Play involves no hidden information. Each player begins with 16 pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns. Each piece type moves differently, with the most powerful being the queen and the least powerful the pawn. The objective is to checkmate the opponent's king by placing it under an inescapable threat of capture. In addition to checkmate, a player wins the game if the opponent resigns, or (in a timed game) runs out of time. There are also several ways that a game can end in a draw.

Many of the elaborate chess sets used by the aristocracy have been lost, but others partially survive, such as the Lewis chessmen.

Chess was often used as a basis of sermons on morality. An example is Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium sive super ludo scacchorum ('Book of the customs of men and the duties of nobles or the Book of Chess'), written by an Italian monk Jacobus de Cessolis c. 1300. This book was one of the most popular of the Middle Ages.

The work was translated into many other languages and was the basis for William Caxton’s The Game and Playe of the Chesse (1474). Different chess pieces were used as metaphors for different classes of people, and human duties were derived from the rules of the game or from visual properties of the chess pieces.

In a game of chess, each possible move represents a different game, a different universe in which you make a better move. The first move, however, begins a spiral into chaos. After both players move, 400 possible games exist, by the 2nd move there are 197,742 possible outcomes, by the 3rd move there are 121 million, and by the 4th there are 288 billion. There are an infinite number of possible outcomes, which makes that first move terrifying.

Chess is a good mental exercise. Through the years many great thinkers have been fascinated by it.

Chess is also a game that was born during a brutal age when life accounted for little and everyone believed some people were worth more than others. Kings and pawns, is anyone worth more than anyone else? Many have believed this to be true and many still believe this to be true today. From royalty, to wealth, to intelligence, to race and religion these beliefs have fueled racism and bigotry throughout the ages.

Chess is just a game; real people are not its pieces. You can’t assign more value to some of them than to others. People are not a thing to be sacrificed. People, who look on the world as a game of chess, deserve to lose.