The Strong Anti-War Message in the War Game That Is Chess
Tags: War, Fps, Chess, Chaturanga, Peace

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

Many understand chess is a war game. The game originates as a war allegory from India called chaturanga. The game was allegedly created to teach young Indian princes how to be good field generals. As a player, one starts to understand things like controlling territory to gain advantage and how mobility can be leveraged for victory. The player understands the center of the board is the “high ground”. One also learns that not controlling it can lead to cramped positions making it difficult to maneuver, leading directly to defeat.

Interestingly, it was a soldier who taught me the game. Well more correctly a sailor, since my father was in the Navy deployed to the Vietnam theater. He taught me one of the few weeks he was home from the war. I still remember quite clearly sitting with him on the kitchen floor, which looked like a chessboard coincidentally. We sat upon a checkerboard linoleum floor in our old Long Beach apartment. I eagerly listened to my Dad’s every word. I never saw him due to the war. He had my attention when he was home. With so few moments with my father as a child, this lesson stuck with me.

Over the years, as I learned more about the game and its history. I began to understand the war allegory encapsulated in every game. The more I played the more I “grokked” how accurate this war game really was. As you play the game, you are in control. You fight to protect your King while marshaling your forces to storm your opponent’s defenses.

The more you play, the more you understand the war analogy too. You see how war honors no particular rank. If the sacrifice of the Queen and both your Rooks leads to checkmate and victory, well then you will do just that. It is everything to protect your King and checkmate the opposing monarch. If it means trading off the most powerful pieces to gain advantage you will do it. Rank means nothing if the ultimate goal is victory.

You also learn about the power of the people in the trenches, the foot soldiers of chess, the pawns. You lose these easily, but if you lose them all too soon, victory is difficult. Most games between relatively equal opponents will go many moves with only a few pieces left. One side inevitably is able to get a pawn all the way across the board to be promoted to whatever piece they want, most likely a Queen. Foot soldiers are expendable as individuals, but if you lose them all, you likely will lose the battle.

Finally, there is this very, very important lesson about the war game that is chess. As you play, your ego and your intellect are very much tied to the outcomes and this is quite painful. After all, nothing is hidden from you. If you lose, YOU LOST. It was not bad luck, it was bad decision making. Your ego will be bruised, but you will walk away to play another day. As the master of your pieces(army), you are like the politicians back home who start the wars but never actually shed any blood upon the battlefield.

It is here where chess as a war analogy really shines. As my nation becomes ever more belligerent and pugnacious across the globe, I want my fellow citizens to play more chess. It helps inoculate them from warmongering rhetoric about the GLORY of war. My grandfather fought in the Battle of the Bulge and as I said my father was in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Due to this family heritage, one thing was made crystal clear to me. The only glory in war goes to the politicians and generals, otherwise known as REMFs. Playing chess reinforces the insight that the only glory of war goes to those moving the pieces, not for those fighting on the battlefield.