Setting up Chess960 over the board

Set up a game over the board in thirty seconds: roll a position, mirror it on Black's back rank, and play. Everything else is ordinary chess.

Setting up over the board

1. Roll a position above. It gives you one of the 960 legal arrangements.
2. Set White's back rank to match, left to right from White's side.
3. Mirror it for Black. Black's pieces face White's directly, as in standard chess.
4. Pawns stay on the second and seventh ranks, untouched.

Note where the king and rooks start, because that determines what castling looks like in this game. The panel above tells you.

The one rule to check before you start

Castling always finishes on the standard squares, whatever the pieces started on: g1 and f1 short, c1 and d1 long. That means the king sometimes barely moves, and sometimes moves left to castle short. It looks wrong the first time and it is entirely legal.

Full Chess960 castling rules →

Playing against a computer

You can play Chess960 against the computer here. Pick a starting position or paste a FEN, choose a difficulty, and play.

The other thing this site has that the big servers do not is a Chess960 puzzle trainer. Their tactics trainers are standard chess only, because no public Chess960 puzzle set exists.

Train the part that is actually hard

Playing 960 is easy to start. Seeing tactics in it is not, because the shapes are unfamiliar and your pattern recognition does not fire. The free puzzle trainer drills exactly that, on positions mined from real games and verified by an engine, and the books hold a thousand at a time.