To play chess you need a chessboard and a set of chess pieces. They can be purchased together or separately. Buying a set containing a chessboard and pieces ensures that pieces will be the right size for the board. If you buy your pieces and board separately, make sure that their sizes are compatible. Too small pieces might make the set look silly and assessing the position on the board difficult, but they won’t make the game unplayable. If the piece base diameter is bigger than size of a single square, it will make the game impossible to play. It is suggested that base diameter of the piece should be about 75% of square size.

The chessboard is a square. It contains 64 smaller squares, positioned in 8 rows with 8 squares each. Each of the 64 squares is alternately “dark” or “light”. Traditionally it is black and white, but these terms are rarely used in reference to squares. The reason for that seems to be the terminology used for game analysis. Sides (and pieces) are referred to as “black” and “white”, and squares as “dark” and “light”, probably in order not to create confusion with terms like “black white-squared bishop”. Instead there is a “black light-squared bishop”, which indicates a bishop piece belonging to the black player, which moves on light squares.

The board is characterized by square size and board size. Board size isn’t simply square size times 8, because it also takes the frame into account. When looking at the sizes, make sure not to confuse inches with centimeters.

Each one of 8 horizontal lines of squares is a “rank” and each vertical one is a “file”. Files are lettered a to h, ranks are numbered 1 to 8. Not all boards have these letters and numbers written on them, but if they do, remember that “a1″ square should be dark, otherwise the board is incorrect. It may seem unimportant to the casual player, but when one tries for example to follow an annotated game, he might get confused if the piece referred to as a “dark-squared bishop” is actually on a light square.

A set of pieces should contain 32 pieces: a king, a queen, 2 rooks, 2 knights, 2 bishops and 8 pawns for both “white” and “black”. White and black sometimes are not exactly these colors, but it doesn’t matter much. Some sets include an extra queen for each side. However, it is rare for a player to have two queens on the board, and a second queen can be improvised by an upturned rook. Therefore an extra queen isn’t a must, although certainly is nice to have. If a set contains extra queens, it will be explicitly stated. If it isn’t stated, you should assume it does not.

A set is usually described by king height and king base diameter (king is used because it is the largest piece) with values in inches and/or centimeters. Also mentioned is weight of the set.