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Place every piece on a real board and have your setup checked square by square.
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The Coddy chess course starts from the setup and takes you through the openings, tactics and endgames - one interactive position at a time.
A chess board is set up the same way every single game, which is good news: it is one arrangement to learn, not a decision to make. The board goes between the two players so that each has a light square in the corner nearest their right hand. Each player's back row - the one closest to them - holds the eight major pieces, and the row in front of it holds all eight pawns.
The back row reads outward from the corners: rook, knight, bishop, then the queen and king in the middle, then bishop, knight, rook. The rooks are the towers and they take the corners. The knights are the horses and they stand beside them. The bishops come next, and the two remaining central squares belong to the queen and the king.
Which of those two central squares belongs to which piece is the only genuinely confusing part, and there is a phrase for it: the queen goes on her own colour. The white queen stands on a light square, the black queen on a dark one. Get that right and the kings end up facing each other across the board, which is exactly how it should look.
Choose a piece from the tray - the white pieces on the top row, the black ones below - then tap the square you think it belongs on. Tapping a square that already holds that piece clears it again.
Resist checking as you go. Being told afterwards that d1 is wrong teaches you far more than copying a finished diagram, because you find out what you actually believed.
Correct squares turn green, wrong ones red. If you have made one of the two classic mistakes, the tool names it: the king and queen swapped, or the board turned the wrong way.
Show me the answer fills in the whole starting position so you can see the finished board. Clear the board and try again a day later - a setup you can rebuild from nothing is one you know.
Files are the columns a to h, left to right from White's side. Ranks are the rows 1 to 8, with rank 1 nearest White.
| Piece | White square | Black square | How to remember |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rook | a1 and h1 | a8 and h8 | The towers hold the corners |
| Knight | b1 and g1 | b8 and g8 | The horses stand beside the towers |
| Bishop | c1 and f1 | c8 and f8 | Inside the knights, either side of royalty |
| Queen | d1 (light) | d8 (dark) | The queen goes on her own colour |
| King | e1 (dark) | e8 (light) | Beside his queen, facing the other king |
| Pawns | a2 to h2 | a7 to h7 | All eight across the whole second row |
If a dark square sits in the near-right corner, the board has been rotated a quarter turn. Everything looks almost right, but every file is mirrored - your king ends up on the queen's square and vice versa. Turn the board 90 degrees so a light square is on your right, and the whole back row falls into place. This is why a board's coordinates only make sense once it is facing the right way.
By far the most common setup mistake, and the reason the phrase "queen on her own colour" exists. The white queen belongs on d1, which is light; the white king on e1, which is dark. Black mirrors this: queen on the dark d8, king on the light e8. The consequence of getting it wrong is not cosmetic - castling and most opening theory assume the king is on the e-file.
Reading outward from the corner it is rook, then knight, then bishop. Putting the bishop next to the rook is an easy slip because both are tall pieces in most sets. A useful check: each player starts with one bishop on light squares and one on dark, and if yours are both on the same colour they are in the wrong place.
White's queen is on d1 and Black's is on d8 - the same file, not mirrored. If you set the board up so that Black's queen faces White's king, one side is wrong. The test is that the two queens should face each other down the d-file and the two kings down the e-file.
