Thematic: Chess - The Digital Philatelist

Chess is a two-player strategy board game played on a checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an 8×8 grid. Played by millions of people worldwide, chess is believed to be derived from the Indian game chaturanga sometime before the 7th century. Chaturanga is also the likely ancestor of the East Asian strategy games xiangqi (Chinese chess), janggi (Korean chess), and shogi (Japanese chess). Chess reached Europe by the 9th century, due to the Umayyad conquest of Hispania. The pieces assumed their current properties in Spain in the late 15th century, and the modern rules were standardized in the 19th century.