>not a single balance update since the 8th century
You’re just begging AnarchyChess to correct you.
You should only be Googling things en passant, and not hang around too long.
I’ll show myself out.
OK, I looked it up on Wikipedia. The bishop and queen were the last to have their moves set changed to the modern form in the 15th or 16th century. But even since then there have been some tweaks, such as the 3 move and 50 move rules for draws, and the orientation of the board. So you could maybe argue no balancing since the 16th century, and only a few bug fixes after that.
White is OP, known issue since 1889 and devs haven’t addressed it. Dead game
Ah, there was a rule update just “recently” (1971). You could technically castle across the vertical board if you promoted to rook.
Castling itself (as a single move) is a 17th century balance update. Before that it was done as separate moves. But the only reason castling became a thing was because the Queen and Bishop were buffed in the 15th century allowing them to threaten more spaces. This made it more advantageous to fortify the king’s position than to have him flee.
But bots have become a big problem for this game recently.
Funny story time:
I had someone cheat against me the other day (without me realizing it, because I don’t have the game sense to tell), then offer a draw in a clearly winning position. I guess they were trying to avoid detection, but I decided that I didn’t want their handout, declined the draw offer, and resigned.
The system immediately flagged them as cheating and refunded my elo, so I guess all’s well that ends well.
It’s the rating system for competitive gaming that was originally developed for chess, but has since been applied to all sorts of gaming, sports, etc. sometimes you might even hear people refer to a game’s matchmaking rating as “elo”, even it’s not called that.
Also, fun fact: it’s not an acronym, it’s a guy’s name:
Not quite true. Before the ~15th century, the queen moved like the king and the pawns could only move 1 square from their starting square. These changes were made to make the game more exciting and less slow.
That old set excavated in Britain (Lewis Chessmen) had other pieces as well, such as the Berserker.
