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How to play Knightmate: rules and setup

Knightmate is played by 2 players on a board with 8 × 8 squares. White moves first. Protect a royal knight; the king-shaped commoners can be captured.

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Play Knightmate

Quick answer

Knightmate is a chess variant on the normal 8×8 board in which the royal piece is a knight. Checkmating it wins. Each side's royal knight starts on the king's square, and commoners, which move like kings but can be captured freely, take the knights' places. Check rules apply only to the royal knight, which can also castle. This guide covers Knightmate. Check the movement, capture and game-ending rules below before applying rules from another variant.

Players
2
Board
8 × 8 squares
First move
White moves first.

Ruleset and sources: Knightmate

Setup

Game illustration
Game illustration. Follow the setup instructions to prepare a new game.

Base rules: chess. An 8×8 chess setup with a royal knight on each king's starting square and commoners on the usual knight squares.

Board
8 × 8 squares
Players
2
First move
White moves first.
Rules used here
Knightmate

Moves and captures

  • Legal moves

    The royal knight moves like a knight and must escape check. Commoners move one square in any direction and have no royal protection.

  • Using the board

    Select a piece to see its legal destinations, then select a highlighted square. When several promotions are available, choose from the promotion panel.

Special rules

  • The royal knight can castle to g1/c1 or g8/c8 with its rook when the castling conditions are met.

  • Pawns promote to queen, rook, bishop or commoner, marked M.

Winning and draws

  • Checkmate the opponent's royal knight to win.

  • Capturing a commoner does not finish the game.

  • Stalemate is a draw.

  • A player may claim a draw after threefold repetition or 50 moves by each side without a capture or pawn move.

  • If neither side has enough material to checkmate, the game is drawn automatically.

Example

Sources and rule verification

Ruleset covered
Knightmate
  1. The Chess Variant Pages — Knightmate
  2. Fairy-Stockfish variants (implementation reference)
  3. Fairy-Stockfish — variant definitions (43b66c8, implementation reference)

This guide describes play on ChessPlayX. Platform-specific conventions are stated in the relevant sections; tournament administration may differ.

A separate rule-review date is not recorded for this guide. The update date is not a verification date.