Chess is probably one of the most used board games in the arts. That ranges from books like Stefan Zweig‘s The Royal Game to J.K. Rowling‘s Harry Potter, films like The Seventh Seal to X-Men and I don’t know how many paintings.

Scene from The Seventh Seal

Often, death is involved in those games. Usually, the hero plays for his life, either against death itself or against someone who wants to kill him. Or, as in The Royal Game, he plays to keep his own sanity, not to save his life, but himself.

I’m just happy that I don’t have to play against death, because I suck at chess. It’s embarassing and pitiful, but I always lose, no matter what I do.

Anyway, I think it’s interesting that chess has that kind of strong fascination, which maybe has to do with the symbolic nature of the game (protection of the homeland etc) and the direct battle of the minds of two people. But it probably also has to do with some (alleged) deaths surrounding chess.

No, playing chess, unlike other sports, never killed anyone directly. But people were murdered for it. Like the two royalties who got killed because they didn’t know how to lose. Or the guy, whose price for a chess board was a bit too high.

In one likely apocryphal story about the origin of chess, the King of Hind, commissioned a peasant or minister to create a strategy game of surpassing quality. The king, pleased with the result, and asked the inventor to name his price. The inventor gave the king a choice, his own weight in gold, or, the king could put one grain of rice on the first square of the board, two on the second, 4 on the 3rd, and keep on doubling the number of grains for every one of the 64 squares. The king hastily chose the second option. Somewhere around square 32, he came to a realization that there was not enough rice in the kingdom. Upon realizing that he could not possibly pay the debt, the king chose to kill the inventor.

There’s also the story about the guy, whose head exploded during a chess game. But at least that never happened. Or we would have to classify chess as an extreme sport. And, seriously, there’s enough of that already.