Chess Board

Manufacturing of the Chessboards

The chessboard is manufactured of wood or any firm, durable fibre such as ebony, ivory, marble, metal, glass, and plastic. For international or continental championships, FIDE stated that only the wooden boards can be used. For other FIDE tournaments, plastic, wood, or cardboard boards may be used, and the board must be rigid in all respects. The board can also be made of marble, as long as there is a suitable contrast between the light and dark squares.

The board has sixty-four total squares arranged uniformly in eight rows and columns. The squares are arranged in two alternative colours (black and white mostly). The squares are generally numbered via using algebraic notation. The ranks (horizontal rows) are numbered from 1 to 8 and counting start from the white side towards the black side. The files (vertical columns), on the other hand, are enumerated by using lower alphabetic case letters.  The length of the squares should be 5 to 6.5 cm and the ratio between the squares and the pieces should be such that the side of a square should be twice the diameter of the base of a pawn.

• Center - The center of the board is referred to an area found in the exact middle of the board with four squares.
• Diagonal - The oblique line of the same colour of squares running from one edge to another edge of the board is referred to as a diagonal.
• File - Files are the eight vertical columns present on the chessboard from one end to another end in chessboard.
• Rank - On the contrary to the file, ranks are the horizontal rows present in the chessboard.

The chess boards were used for the first time around the 6^th century in the ancient Indian era. In India, it was regarded as Chaturanga, and the chessboard was known as Ashtapada. The Ashtapada board had a monochromatic colour and eight divisions of each row and column. The board has distinctive marks known as the castles in the first, fourth, fifth and eighth squares in a, d, e and h columns. The Ancient Persian used a little modified chess in which more number of rows and columns were added. In today’s time, three-dimensional boards are also being used. The recent Raumschach variant has five boards in total with 25 squares each, leading to a sum of 125 squares. Nowadays, computer-generated boards are also used to play e-matches. The modern chessboards are more durable than the ones used in earlier times.