Maybe Parcheesi is more your style.
Cool, because this used to mean you had died. 
Never played. Do you actually eat cheese in the game? Becuase I think that’s what OP is after.
Your brain has difficulty with perception of diagonal lines? Maybe you ought to get that checked. I find each bishop staying perpetually on one color to be an elegantly simplifying factor amid all the complexity.
The original name for the monochrome diagonal piece in Sanskrit was (IIRC) hasti ‘the elephant’ (i.e., Indian war elephant—if you’ve fought with them in Civilization, you know they’re pretty mean and aggressive). The Arabic name for it is al-fil (pronounced “feel”), ‘the elephant’, and IIRC this was borrowed into mediæval Spanish or Portuguese as alfil. The French call it le fou: ‘the fool’.
The fil, though, had a markedly different power to the modern bishop - it could move exactly two squares diagonally, a clumsy move that limited each fil to one-eighth of the board and made the four of them all unable to interact with each other. The fact that, like the Knight, it was a leaper (and hence could not be obstructed) did not really compensate.
More people struggle to perceive the Knight’s move, probably because it’s taught badly. Discard the L-shape or dog-leg that’s usually used in books, even quite good books, and instead view the Knight’s move as the shortest move that does not duplicate anything a Queen could do, and you’re off and away. As an added bonus, this should easily let you see that a Knight must move to a square of opposite colour every time, and hence that it cannot reach in an even number of moves any square that it can reach in an odd number.
Johanna, even more like the true war elephant is the piece that gives Mad Elephant Chess its name - a piece that can be goaded into trampling recklessly over friend and foe alike. 
Me, too. I’d set up scenarios and then put the game in autoplay mode just to watch the slaughter and destruction. One of the best games ever!
FWIW, I’ve never won any game of chess in my entire life.
Though in one of my university classes, there was a chess game on our Mac computer where you could set it up so both players were played by the computer,* and* you could have each player sing out its moves! I’d do that instead of work. No wonder I failed that class…
Dude, I haven’t played Nuke War in ages! Now that was some fun!
“Here’s some propaganda that steals 25 million of your population. Oh yeah, here’s a Polaris missle to nuke those traitors to hell!”
I think I still have my copy in the basement. I wonder if the spinner still works.
(Sorry for the hijack)
Kelevra
I prefer to teach it as one straight and one diagonal. The path is sort of a curve.
IME, speed chess is played by people with…home-having issues.
Take a 5x5 grid. Put a rook in the middle and eliminate all the squares it can move to. Then put a bishop in the middle and mark off all its squares. What’s left?
Look, lemme lay it out for you, cuz you’re obviously just a whiny bitch that doesn’t know what happened to him. It goes like this. You go to college. You buy a fancy car. You get a nice suit. You make it rain. And when you get home, I’m there fucking your bitch. You know why she’s steppin’ out? Cuz I know whassup and you juss still frontin’.
You can have all the queens and you still won’t beat me. Know why? Cuz son, you ain’t a closer.
Oddly enough, for me the “L” is the easiest one to visualize. I don’t think there’s anything bad about books teaching that method, although (as this thread illustrates), it appears people have different ways of remembering that stick, so the best approach would be to offer all the ways of visualizing the knight’s move and letting the student figure out with is best for them.
I don’t have the attention span to play chess effectively. Therefore, I neither love it nor hate it.
Um, no. Perfectly straight line, just not on any of the 45-degree increments. That explains why Ng1-f3 is unobstructable - it’s not passing directly over either g2 or f2.
Exact-amundo. What we’re aiming for is to visualise the Knight’s destination squares directly and ideally see all eight (max) of them in a pattern around the piece. Then you’re a step closer to being able to use it effectively. IMNESHO trying to use the L-shape or dog-leg is a hindrance, not a help.
It’s true. There are players like that. They wish it weren’t so, but it is. 
Fritz Leiber (sf author) got some mileage out of the resemblance of a Knight’s moves to the footprints of a spider.
When playing Live Chess (using people on a lawn as chesspieces) the Knight’s move is essentially, “Excuse me…Beg your pardon…Coming through…Thank you,” rather like someone carrying a bowl of soup from a buffet.
Chess with a computer is like…guessing who can square root a random number the quickest…then move a piece respective to the answer.
The computer has every scenario calculated instantly , while you can only conceive a few or more at any given time.
No matter what I opened with, the computer always did the same best opening. So, I was always on defensive. Until I matched the computer verbatim once and with a few aggressive moves, I won eventually.
I never played since. :mad:
Not even close. It takes a full minute to think about all the third-moves available, and over five minutes to get a fourth. Even then, so what? My computer thought …Bd6 was best against the London system!
Openings are actually a computer’s weakest part because there are so many pieces on the board and anything concrete is over its thinking horizon. That’s the part of the game where you should be able to catch it.
This reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe, claiming that Maelzel could not be a chess-playing automaton (he was correct) because, if it were, it would play a perfect game, always (he was incorrect!) Chess-playing algorithms are far short of “perfect,” and the game has not yet been solved.
However, cheap (free!) chess-playing programs exist for personal computers, and are at such a level of sophistication, they can whip my butt, even at the “easiest” difficulty setting!
Question for Chessic Sense: am I actually gaining any useful experience playing against a computer? Is it making me a better player at all? Or is it simply reinforcing my bad habits? Would I be better off shucking the computer programs and seeking out a play-by-email opponent of my own (pathetic!) level of skill?
Was bin ich, gehackte Leber?
If you’ve reached the exact same position for three times because you were fiddling with your dick while she said “well, are you coming or WHAT?”, you can’t blame the mother of the inventor of chess for leaving in a huff…
I was not aware that I spake mediæval Spanish… we still call that piece alfil. The name also gave us alférez, the equivalent of ensign in the Spanish army and navy.
It depends. If you’re able to beat the computer, then sure, you can play it. If you’re always getting crushed, then I’d suggest putting it on hold for a bit and reading a book. The best way to get better is to deeply analyze your losses and to read chess books. If you want human opponents, there’s no reason to go through email. Just play on any of the myriad sites on the Internet like chess.com.
You’re cute when you’re jealous. I always picture you in chess threads as Jonathan Poe.