Something else that’s been bugging me since I saw the movie (but didn’t realize till now)…
In the real-world game of chess, when you take a piece with another piece, you remove the taken piece from the board, and the taking piece moves onto the space it occupied. That is, if white pawn A takes black pawn B, white pawn A moves into the spot where black pawn B used to be.
In the game of chess with the giant statues near the end of the movie, that wasn’t what was happening. Instead, the piece doing the taking would whip out its sword/mace/whatever and beat the crap out of the taken piece, then when it would done it would just sit there in the square instead of moving into the spot occupied by the vanquished piece. It’s not just that they didn’t show it; this is very clear from the position of the pieces in the following moves, the remains of the vanquished pieces sat there on the board for the rest of the game.
Were they supposed to be not actually playing chess, or does “wizard chess” have radically different rules than the version us muggles play?