First Lessons in Chess covers all of the basic rules, gets players familiar with the mechanics and nomenclature of the chess board, explains basic moves for the pawns and all the pieces, including castling, pawn promotion, en passant, checks checkmates and stalemates, and even takes a brief look at some basic tactics, openings and endgame play.

All of this is covered in 30 chapters, each devoted to a different topic. Lessons are taught not just by solving a series of puzzles, but via comprehensive text explanations, now with full audio playback capability so that they are accessible to even younger players or less skillful readers.

FLIC even has three separate Challenge chapters: the Board Challenge, the Piece Challenge and the Marching Pawn Game. Each Challenge requires the user to make a series of 20 correct moves with the designated piece, often within a time limit – and if you make any mistakes you have to start over! The Challenges are designed to quickly get new players familiar not just with how pieces and pawns move or promote, but to also quickly make thinking about the chessboard second nature even for the newest players. (And once they are fluent in this, the transition to algebra and graphing in their math courses becomes so much easier)!

As with the other Chess Workout volumes, you can use Chess Club Manager’s ‘Weekly Workout’ feature to implement a formal course specifically designed for your Novice players, where one or more chapters from FLIC are emailed as weekly Assignments to your Novice group. In this way, you will be certain that everyone thoroughly masters all of the basics, and is ready to progress to doing the rest of Chess Workouts to continue the next steps in becoming real chess thinkers.

With 30 Chapters containing 264 ‘Pages’ and 901 interactive Screens, First Lessons in Chess covers everything a new player needs to know to get started in chess.