CHESS IS, AMONG OTHER THINGS, A wargame. Indeed, its enduring popularity is only explicable by the fact that the wooden board and men are a simulacrum of the clash of flesh and blood. It is human to delight in re-enacting in symbolic form what we most dread in reality. And so monarchs and marshals alike have always been partial to chess.
From the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, at whose court in Baghdad the first grandmasters of chess flourished in the ninth century, to Tamburlaine the Great, who favoured an expanded “Great Chess” on a larger board to reflect his conquests, and Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who died