Lesson Two

Welcome to Lesson Two! In this lesson, we will focus on Wizard and Muggle Chess and Checkers. These games have been around in the muggle and magical community for centuries.

Wizard's Chess:

Wizard's Chess is much the same as muggle's chess with a few exceptions. In muggle chess, you have to manually move your pieces from square to square and is, in my opinion, less exciting when capturing an opponent's piece. In Wizard's Chess, you can tell your pieces where to move and they will move by themselves. When they capture an opponent's piece it can be rather brutal. The winner's piece will sometimes smash their opponent into pieces thus removing them from the playing field. Sometimes, while playing, if the chess pieces do not deem you to be an experienced player, they will shout out advice like where to move next and which pieces to use.

Chess is played on a checkered board and the rules are the same for both magical and muggle versions. Two players can play at once and each player has a set of pieces - one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns. Each piece moves along the board in a different way from the others. For instance, a queen is able to move in any direction she pleases as many spaces as she wishes as long as she doesn't change her direction in the turn and she doesn't run into any other pieces along the way. However, the pawns are only able to take one step forward on each turn except when capturing another piece, in which case they take one step diagonally forward to capture the piece. Pawns are unable to move backward and can only progress forward. They are considered the weakest players in the game while the queen is the strongest. The knight is able to move in an L shape across the board. The bishops can only move diagonally. The king can only take one step in any direction. To wrap up how the pieces move, the rook is only able to move forward and backward as many spaces as possible until they run into another piece. The objective is to capture the opponent's king while killing off its pieces. To capture the king, you have to put it in checkmate, which means trap it so there is no possible way of escape. At Hogwarts, chess is rather popular with students and it is played quite often.

Chessboard Chamber:

The Chessboard Chamber was created by Professor McGonagall when she enchanted a chessboard to be enormous and its pieces alive. The Chessboard Chamber was used in 1992 to guard the Philosopher's Stone. In order to make it pass the room, one would have to play the enormous chess game and win. You would start off by choosing a piece to play and thus replacing that piece on the board. This proved to not only be difficult for inexperienced players but also immensely dangerous. As it was previously stated, chess pieces liked to demolish each other when they captured them. Therefore, when playing this life-size version, you had to be very careful not to be captured or you could end up hurt pretty badly.

Chess dates back to the 6th century and is thought to have originated in Eastern India. It has gone by many different names throughout the centuries as it gained popularity through many different cultures. Eventually, Europe started calling it shāh which means King and was translated into Check or Chess in English. This is most likely why it is called check when you have a clear path to the king and checkmate when you have trapped the king and thus won the game.

Wizard's Checkers:

Wizard's Checkers is much the same as muggle checkers. Checkers are also called Draughts. To play, you start on a checkered board. Two players can play at once. Some checkers games have red pieces and some have white, but they mostly all have black pieces. One person plays the red (or white) pieces and the other plays the black. The players position their pieces on their side of the board, placing each piece on the first three lines of their side, on only the black spaces. The first player to go moves one of their pieces diagonally forward. Player two then moves their piece diagonally forward. The game continues like this. In order to capture an opponent's piece, you have to jump over their piece diagonally and onto the space behind it. To win, you have to either collect all of your opponent's pieces or trap your opponent to where they are unable to make a move.

The only difference between Wizard's Checkers versus Muggle's Checkers is that you are most likely able to move your pieces magically along. Besides that, they are practically the same game. Checkers puzzles are posted in The New York Ghost so that readers can try to figure out what would be the best move based on the picture of a checkerboard and its pieces that they are given.

There have been many historical sightings of checkers being played. Checkers dates back to 3000 BC when a board similar to that of a checkerboard was found in Ur, which was a city-state in ancient Mesopotamia (nowaday Iraq). Checkerboards and their pieces have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, Queen Hapshetsut played checkers, and Plato wrote that the game originated from Egypt. During the Trojan War, checkers was played and the Romans would play it as well. Although these versions of checkers were not played exactly how nowaday checkers is played, they are very similar and nowaday checkers originated from these older versions. 

That's it for Lesson Two! Make your way over to Assignment Two :)