One More Move. Chess has long been used as a metaphor for fate, struggle, and human agency. From medieval murals to Ingmar Bergman’s cinema and a mysterious 19th-century painting, today´s article explores how what looks like destiny may, in fact, be an unexamined position—and why sometimes there is still one move left to play.

There is something powerful about a chessboard.

I’ve felt it many times. As an amateur chess player — serious enough to respect the game — I know the silence that descends when the board turns into an intellectual challenge.

A chessboard doesn’t tolerate improvisation in the way life sometimes pretends to. There is no randomness to hide behind. No luck to blame. Every position is the sum of decisions that have already been made.

That atmosphere — austere and magnetic — has found its way back into popular imagination in recent years, not least through The Queen’s Gambit series, which reminded millions that chess is not a pastime.

It is a disciplined mental confrontation that demands calculation, foresight, and restraint.

This is why chess has always been such a powerful stage for stories, confrontations, and battles.

Strictly speaking, chess is not even a “game” in the common sense. There is no luck or randomness involved. There is no uncertainty built into its mechanics — no dice, no shuffled deck. Chess is closer to a deterministic system, a mathematical confrontation governed by logic, memory, and foresight. If something goes wrong, it is never because the universe interfered — it is because of a decision.

This makes it a dramatic set for a confrontation.

Long before Netflix (The Queen´s Gambit), this intuition was already painted on a church wall.

In Täby Church, near Stockholm, a late-15th-century mural attributed to Albertus Pictor shows Death playing chess with a man. Death is skeletal, calm, almost patient. The man leans forward, absorbed, as if the board were the last surface of meaning left to him. Above them, a painted phrase declares: “I play checkmate.”

What matters is that we can see the board — but not clearly enough to analyze it. The pieces are symbolic, not precise. The mural does not invite calculation; it invites surrender. The message is clear: no matter how well you play, the ending is known.

Centuries later, that image resurfaced in one of cinema’s most iconic scenes.

In The Seventh Seal, a scene I had already covered in a previous post (death, the ultimate guru), a disillusioned knight returning from the Crusades meets Death on a desolate beach.

Instead of fleeing or pleading, he does something unexpected: he challenges Death to a game of chess. If the knight wins, he lives. If he loses, he dies.

But the true bargain is subtler. The knight does not really believe he can defeat Death. What he is buying is time. Time to act, to observe, to understand, to perform one last meaningful gesture before the curtain falls.

In Ingmar Bergman’s film, chess becomes a philosophical device. The board is visible. The game is ongoing. Moves are made, mistakes are punished, cleverness is rewarded — but the end, we know, is inevitable. The knight cannot win the final game. Still, the way he plays matters.

That framing alone would have been enough to secure chess its place as a metaphor for human struggle.

But there is another image — quieter, more ambiguous — that complicates the story.

In the 19th century, the German artist Moritz Retzsch created an engraving known as Die Schachspieler — The Chess Players.

It is often reproduced under a more decisive title: Checkmate.

The scene is intimate and tense. A young man sits at the board, his posture heavy, his gaze fixed, as if he already knows the verdict.

Opposite him sits a dark, confident figure — commonly interpreted as Satan or Mephistopheles — relaxed, assured, almost bored by the certainty of his triumph. Behind them stands an angel, neither intervening nor turning away, simply witnessing.

The board rests on what appears to be the lid of a sarcophagus.

Everything about the composition tells you the story is over.

For years, that is how the painting was read. The devil wins. The soul is lost. The title seals the meaning.

And yet, if you are a chess player, something in the image refuses to settle.

Because chess players don’t read titles first.
They read positions.

It is not CheckMate. There is one More Move

The story goes — and it has circulated in chess circles for well over a century — that the American chess prodigy Paul Morphy once encountered this image hanging in a room. While others saw despair, Morphy saw a diagram waiting to be tested.

He studied the board.
He ignored the posture of the players.
He disregarded the angel’s sorrow and the devil’s confidence.

And then he said something quietly subversive:

It’s not checkmate.

According to the anecdote, there was one legal move still available—a resource hidden in the position that overturned or delayed the apparent finality of the scene. The game was not lost. The man could save himself.

Whether every detail of that encounter is historically airtight almost doesn’t matter. What matters is that the story survived.

Checkmate is not a mood.
It is a technical condition.
And technical conditions must be verified.

What the painting may really be saying

At that point, the painting changes character.

You begin to wonder whether Retzsch intended this ambiguity — whether he deliberately staged a moment that looks terminal to anyone guided by emotion, but remains open to anyone guided by analysis.

Or whether something even more human happened: an artist painted a moral scene, and a chess player later refused to accept the moral without checking the math.

Either way, the result is unsettling in the best possible sense.

Because it suggests that what risks condemning the young man in the image is not the devil’s strength, but the assumption that the game is already over.

As a chess player, I find that idea impossible to forget.

On a board, resignation is optional.
And in life, resignation often arrives long before necessity. 

The most dangerous moment is not when the position is bad.
It’s when we stop looking.

That is why this story keeps echoing across centuries — from medieval murals, to Bergman’s bleak shorelines, to a 19th-century engraving that refuses to stay settled.

Not because it promises victory. But because it insists on something more demanding:

Before you accept “destiny”, 
check the board one more time.

Not with hope.
Not with fear.
But with attention.

Because sometimes what we call fate is just an unexamined position —
and sometimes, quietly, there is still a move left to play.

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