Chess for Kids
Chess Pieces for Kids: Fun Games to Learn the Moves
The rules of chess are fairly simple, and most adults can pick them up in about twenty minutes. Children don't always take to them the same way. That's why chess players have invented a whole set of games to teach kids how the pieces move.
The Hungry Knight, the Pawn Game, Rugby, the Lake Loop. Do any of these ring a bell? If not, let's get started.
Start With the Rules
Before the games, a quick word on the rules themselves, just in case. Explaining chess to a child goes a lot better once the rules are in place, so if yours hasn't learned them yet, our guide to chess rules is a good place to start. With that out of the way, on to the games.
The Pawn Game
This is the classic game for learning how the pawn moves, sometimes called Pawn Wars. Set up only the pawns, on their starting ranks, with nothing else on the board.
White moves first, then each side takes a turn. Whoever gets a pawn to the far end of the board first wins. It's a genuinely fun game, and it lets kids build their first bits of strategy without juggling a full set of pieces.
It's worth remembering that the actual goal of chess is to checkmate the opposing king, not to race a pawn to the end. Still, when a pawn does reach the last rank, it gets to make a special move called pawn promotion, turning into any piece the player picks.
Pawns have a second special move too, en passant, which is worth learning on its own once this game feels easy.
None of the games below put the king on the board, so how does the king move in chess is worth covering on its own.
For a full walkthrough of this game, see our pawn game guide.
The Hungry Knight
To teach how the knight moves, you can simply play the Pawn Game again, this time adding one knight for each side.
Or you can play the Hungry Knight instead. The setup is simple.
White moves first, and whoever captures every enemy pawn first wins. The knights themselves are off limits, and the pawns aren't allowed to move at all.
It's good fun to watch the knights hop over the pawns to pick them off one by one.
Learning the Bishop's Move
The bishop and the knight are worth about the same, three points each, but they move in completely different ways, and comparing how the bishop moves with the knight's jump is a useful exercise. Set up the same pawns-only position as the Pawn Game, then add a bishop on the light square f1 and a knight on g8. Whoever gets a pawn to the far end first, or captures every enemy pawn first, wins.
Rugby, for the Queen's Move
Now it's the chess queen's turn, in a game called Rugby. No tackles, no scrums, just this starting position.
White moves first. If White gets a pawn to the far end of the board, White wins. If the black queen manages to capture every white pawn, Black wins instead.
Black can already threaten to grab a pawn on the very first move, so White needs to look before moving.
The Eight Queens Puzzle
While we're on the queen, there's a famous mathematical puzzle worth trying. How do you place eight queens on a chessboard so that none of them attacks another?
An excellent visualization exercise.
Mathematicians have known the exact answer for the classic 8×8 board since the nineteenth century, 92 arrangements in total. It's the general version of the problem, for boards of any size, that mathematicians only worked out a good answer for fairly recently.
The Lake Loop
One last exercise, from chess coach Xavier Parmentier, built to train the rook and the bishop together.
Set up this position.
White moves first, and the pawns stay put the whole time. The goal is to walk the chess rook and the bishop all the way around the block of pawns, clockwise, and bring them back to their starting squares. No captures allowed.
Your Move
That covers the best games for teaching kids how the pieces move. Structured lessons can build on this too, with rules, strategy and tactics taught step by step alongside more games and exercises.
The goal here isn't to turn a child into a future world champion like Magnus Carlsen or Garry Kasparov. The point is to show them how much fun it can be to work through a few small chess problems.
Chess can also help build a child's confidence, one of the benefits of chess for kids worth reading up on.
- Head to our guide on chess for kids for the bigger picture.
- New to chess altogether? Start with our complete guide on how to play chess.
- Once the moves feel natural, learn how to set up a chess board for a real game.