PrintableCharts

THE MOVES OF THE PIECES

all six moves from one square, the article of the rules and how many squares each piece holds

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

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Payment and email are handled by Paddle. The download link arrives by email — no account, no password.

Formats
A4 · A3 · A2
What you get
Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject
sport · beginners · reference · study

The moves are FIDE Laws of Chess in force from 1 January 2023, article 3. Square counts are walked, not quoted.

THE KNIGHT GOES WHERE THE QUEEN CANNOT

The queen, the rook and the bishop all move along lines out of one square. The knight does not: not one of its eight squares lies on any line of the queen, and that holds for every square of the board. This is why intervening pieces do not block a knight — between the square it leaves and the square it arrives on there is nothing to pass through.

The second thing the table shows: the rook is the only piece whose number of squares does not depend on where it stands. Seven along the file and seven along the rank come out of any one of the sixty-four squares, corner and middle alike. For the others the spread runs from 7 against 13 for the bishop to 2 against 8 for the knight.

The bishop loses the most, and not in count: a diagonal never changes the colour of a square, so half the board does not exist for it. A bishop on a light square will never stand on a dark one, however many moves it is given — and that is a property of the move, not of any one game.

On the sheet

  • The moves are FIDE Laws of Chess in force from 1 January 2023, article 3. Square counts are walked, not quoted.
  • Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
  • Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

  • Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
  • All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
  • White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
  • Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
  • No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 8 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

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