Chess & Board Games Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the term for an opening in which a player deliberately gives up material, usually a pawn and sometimes more, in the first few moves in return for faster development, open lines or an attack?

Question 2

What is the term for a forcing sequence of chess moves, very often involving a sacrifice, that a player calculates to the end and that leads by force to a clear gain such as checkmate, material or a winning endgame?

Question 3

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?

Question 4

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 5

What is the French name, meaning 'in passing', for the special chess capture in which a pawn that has just advanced two squares from its starting rank may be taken by an enemy pawn exactly as if it had moved only one square, but only on the immediately following move?

Question 6

Which strategy board game, set in the Europe of 1901 and a reported favourite of several US presidents, uses no dice or cards at all, every player writing secret orders for their armies and fleets that are revealed and resolved at the same instant, so that success depends entirely on negotiation and betrayal between the seven powers?

Question 7

Which player, his country's first grandmaster, won the world title in a 2000 knockout, regained it in 2007 and held it until 2013, and is widely credited with igniting a boom that made his homeland a chess superpower?

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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.