Salinas Chess Club Invents A New Game Called 'Name That Move'!

The Future Citizens Foundation has a chess club at the Taylor Farms Center for Learning that meets two afternoons a week and on Saturdays. The Center for Learning provides supervised, healthy activities for elementary school children in the Salinas, CA area. The chess sessions have between 8 and 16 kids on any day and beginners are always welcome.

I volunteer as the chess coach and give every child that attends chess club a free ChessKid account. Students who are working on the site frequently are given a Gold membership.

Together with the ChessKid King and Queen Level students, we invented a game called "Name That Move"! 

At the start of every chess club we solve “mate in 1” puzzles. The puzzles are set up before the kids come in, and everyone attempts to solve them. The beginners use the puzzles to learn what checkmate is and the more advanced students write down the answers using chess notation. Many of the puzzles that we use are from László Polgár's book, CHESS: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games, 1994, Tess Press.   

The mate in 1 puzzles are enlarged and laminated on different colors of paper for ease of use.

After a few months we had a collection of cards with puzzles on them. Players all draw a card with a mate in 1 puzzle and call out the name of the correct move when they think they know it.

The cards do not have numbers on the ranks or letters marked on the files, so the players have to identify the square while calling out the mate in 1 correct move. This makes it fun to practice learning chess notation and the names of the squares.

We don’t take turns -- whoever thinks they have the answer just says, “I got it!” If they are wrong, another player can then say, “I got it!” The pace moves quickly!

If the answer is correct, the player draws another card. If it is wrong, they can try again. Whoever collects the most cards at the end wins!

It is a fun, fast game. Try to "Name That Move" in your chess club and see what your players think!

MacGregor Eddy, Volunteer Chess Coach

Taylor Farms Center for Learning Chess Club

(Editor's note: Another good way to practice learning the names of the squares is the "Vision" feature on ChessKid, where you can turn off the notation for an even larger challenge.)