The Rook

Rooks move horizontally and vertically!

On the chessboard, a rook piece normally looks like a castle and so it is also commonly referred to as a castle instead of rook. However, in this tutorial, we will only refer to it as a rook.

You can move your rook horizontally or vertically in a straight line in any direction, and for as many squares as you like, as long as the traversed squares are all empty and until the side of the board is reached.

So, if your queen were not allowed to move diagonally, but only horizontally and vertically, then it would be just like a rook!

Therefore, a rook is not as powerful as a queen, but it is still quite a powerful piece, and is, in fact, your second most powerful piece, behind the queen.

In addition, you start the game with two rooks, whereas you only get one queen. The rooks always start the game on the two corner squares on your side of the board, and again, just like the king and queen, you cannot move them on your first move as they are completely blocked in by your other pieces.

In any case, during a chess game, you do not normally use your rooks until the later stages of the game, when a lot of pieces have already been captured and there is a lot more room for manoeuver.

There is one special move, called castling, that involves moving a rook and a king in one turn! You will learn about castling in a later lesson, it puts the king in a safer position and allows the rook to exert more influence on the center of the board, at the same time as providing greater protection to your king.

Capturing using a rook

Rooks capture in the same way as the king and queen. You can capture an enemy piece if you can move your rook to the square containing the enemy piece, in which case you remove the enemy piece from the board and replace it with your rook.

Next lesson

In the next lesson, your will learn about your bishop, who takes care of the diagonals!