If you do find the winter blues creeping in your life this season, why not take up an activity to help beat it, like Playing Chess.
When I was a young person, it seemed the game of the whiz kids, or the brainy ones, was Chess. I used to watch a couple of the other guys, play chess on our way home from School on the School bus, they had a magnetic chess set, so the pieces wouldn't slide off the game board when the bus hit a bump, or drove onto a back road. My favorite board game was checkers, I just never got into Chess back then.
Chess is a two player board game, like checkers in that it's played on a checkered board of squares, the squares are light and dark colored, that's about it when it comes to being similar to checkers. The chess pieces are often made in different colors, but the player with the lighter colored pieces goes first. Each player begins with sixteen pieces, as follows: one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns. The goal of the game is to capture the opponents king, which is called checkmate, if neither player has any legal moves, the game is also over, this is called stalemate.
To become an expert at playing chess, you must practice and play for many years, but to become good at it, where you can play and compete with skill against most players, you can just practice over winter, when your stuck inside with nothing to do, playing chess is a great game to learn, and it's also perfect to help fight the winter blues. If you don't have another person to play against, there are lots of great low cost and even free versions of chess you can buy to learn, and play against a computer opponent with different skill ratings.
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