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Who: Aankin and OPEN (plus a part for Obi-Wan)
What: Anakin is at the park, playing chess
When: Saturday, today
Where: The park
Rating/Warnings: Probably low, maybe swearing

It was Saturday, the day was crisp, but sunny, which was really the best you could hope for in New York in the middle of winter.

Anakin had the rest of the day to do as he pleased and he had too much on his mind to spend the day in his apartment. He loaded up his backpack with snacks, his phone (which was his music), his chess set, he threw on hat and a glove (the one hand didn’t need it), his coat, and then grabbed a bus to his favorite park.

He found an empty table – the table and the benches were made out of cement and the tabletop had white and black cement squares inlaid to make a chess board.

Anakin pulled the battered, wooden box out of his backpack and started setting up the metal pieces. He put the black pieces on his side, to be generous to whoever decided to play with him.

For Obi-Wan
Around early afternoon, Anakin sent Obi-Wan some texts:

>> at the park
>> want to take* about memories

He was curious if Obi-Wan was going through the same thing he was – the memory repeating over and over ad nauseam until it felt like it was burned more firmly in his brain than any memory he’d gained naturally over the years. He was sure he wasn’t alone but just wanted to check.

*OOC: unintentional typo, but let's go with it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Anakin pointed along both his row of black pawns and Elliot's row of silver pawns, the squat, plain cylinders.

"These are pawns, and they have a few different moves."

He picked up one of his pawns to demonstrate. "Pawns normally move one space forward at a time, never backwards. Unless, it's its first move, then you have the option of moving two squares forward."

He set the pawn down on the board, two squares ahead of where it started.

"It captures other pieces on the diagonal. Now say your pawn is here," he moved a pawn from Elliot's side, one column over to be diagonal of Anakin's. "The only way I can attack with a pawn like this." He moved his piece along the diagonal to demonstrate. "Now that pawn stays in that column unless I use it to attack another piece. If a piece is directly in front of it in a column, the pawn can't move forward."

He glanced at Elliot to gauge how that information was going down.

"Now pawns have one more move. If it reaches the other side of the board, you can trade it in for another piece of the same color - a rook, knight, bishop, or queen." He pointed out each kind of piece on his side in turn. "But not the king. Make sense?"

Elliott nodded along. He had enough of a frame of reference for chess that Anakin's clear explanation was easy to follow.

"In shogi, you can use captured tiles as your own, but that's not a thing in chess, right?"

"It's not," Anakin confirmed. "In competitions, the pieces have point values so you want to win by capturing as many of your opponent's pieces as possible. But once captured, they don't play a role again unless you get a pawn all the way to the other side and promote it to a higher rank of a piece that was captured before. And I don't keep track of points when I play."

He moved the pawns back to their starting positions.

"Ready for the next piece?"

"Okay." So points were only important in competitions. Well, no need to worry about memorizing values, then.

He watched Anakin arrange the pieces and eyed the others.

"Yeah, I think I've got it so far."

"Okay these pieces," he pointed at the end pieces that looked like castle towers. "These are rooks."

He picked up one and placed in the center of the board.

"It can move horizontally and vertically as many spaces as are open, it can't hop over pieces. It captures a piece by simply moving to the opponent's space."

He skipped over the knight for now and moved onto the bishops. The one with the slanted tops.

"These are bishops. They are like the rooks but move on the diagonal. One moves along white spaces, the other moves long black space." And he pointed that out. "They capture the same way rooks do, by moving into the space an opponent's pieces occupies. Make sense?"

Elliott's eyes followed the trajectory of the pieces, then swept to his side of the board.

"Pawns move one space forward, capture on diagonal. Um, the rooks move straight. ..These ones," he'd forgotten their name already. "They move diagonally."

"You got it. Okay, so these ones," he picked up the cylinder with the horizontal slit at the top, "these are knights. And you got it right, they move in an 'L' shaped pattern. So, like this-" he moved the piece along some 'L' shaped patterns to demonstrate.

"And they can jump over pieces in their way. They capture by taking the piece they end up on."

"Okay," he said, nodding. "So they jump over the pieces in their way, but only take the ones they land on. I guess that'd be pretty OP if they took everything."

He turned his attention back to the straight and diagonal moving pieces. "So these ones," he said, pointing to the rooks and bishops in turn. "They can move any number of spaces? But have to stop if they hit and capture an opponent's piece?"

"Yup, exactly."

Anakin pointed at the two remaining pieces. "This is the king and this is the queen. The queen can move in any direction and go until they hit and capture an opponent's piece. They can't jump like the knight does, though. She is the most powerful piece on the board."

And now they were at the final piece.

"This is the king, the most important piece on the board. Because once he's captured, the game ends."

Elliott knew that much, at least: that the queen was a powerful piece and capturing the king was the goal of the game. Still, he wasn't sure he'd remember it all if they played an actual game.

He tucked his hands away between the seat and his thighs.

"So, how does the king move, then?"

"Okay," Anakin said, picking up his king. "The king can move in any direction, but only one square at a time. But you cannot move the king into danger. So if you have your rook here-" he moved Elliott's rook to one square in front of and to the right of his king. "I can't move my king here-" he move the king forward into the path of the rook, "or here." And he moved his king to the right into the path of the rook.

"But I can use the king to capture pieces if doing so doesn't put the king in danger. So I could take your rook with my king."

He moved the king so it was in the path of Elliott's rook. "If your king is checked - set up for capture - by your opponent's last move, you have to move your king out of danger no matter what. Whether that's by moving the king, or capturing the piece that's checking your king, or moving a piece between your king and the piece checking it."

He moved the piece back to their home squares. "Make sense?"