The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I am fifteen centuries old and I have not changed my mind much.
I began in India, under a name nobody uses any more.
My most powerful piece was, for centuries, my weakest.
There are more ways to play me than there are atoms in the observable universe.
Bishops, knights, and checkmate.
Chess
The queen gained her modern powers in fifteenth-century Europe, at the precise moment real queens were ruling Spain and England.
The game began in India as chaturanga, passed to Persia as shatranj, and reached Europe through Islamic Spain. Checkmate is a fossil of that journey: shah mat, the king is helpless. The medieval version was slow — the queen moved one square diagonally and the bishop jumped exactly two. The modern rules arrived in fifteenth-century Spain and Italy and were called, at the time, mad queen's chess, because the transformation was so violent. Claude Shannon later estimated the number of possible games at ten to the hundred and twentieth power, a figure with no physical comparison worth making.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #5 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #4. Next: mystery #6. Or try #37, #38, #39, #40, #41, #42.