Main Page

Welcome to the explain xkcd wiki!
We have an explanation for all 2 xkcd comics, and only 53 (2%) are incomplete. Help us finish them!

Latest comic

Go to this comic explanation

Chessboard Alignment

|< < Prev #3177 (December 5, 2025)

Title text: Luckily, the range is limited by the fact that the square boundary lines follow great circles.

|< < Prev Random Explanation

Explanation

this comic shows various chess boards, and a piece travelling between them, with the joke being if you align the boards, you can move across them. This is not legal in normal chess ^{[citation needed]}, but is shown here




the title text refers to, how, due to the lines being great circles, the line will eventually come closer at far enough range and not be millimeter accurate.

Transcript

It doesn't happen often because it requires micrometer precision, but if two chess boards are perfectly aligned, it's actually legal to move pieces between them.

Is this out of date? .

New here?

Last 7 days (Top 10)

Rank Score Pages Changes Username 1 5,739 5,720 5,815 DollarStoreBa'al 2 1,922 1,903 1,993 Victoria 3 23 19 24 TheusafBOT 4 11 5 14 Trimutius 5 10 7 10 FaviFake 6 9 6 8 Utdtutyabthsc 7 7 4 7 Lp0 on fire 8 7 5 6 R128 9 7 2 8 boB 10 3 3 3 Starnote

Lots of people contribute to make this wiki a success. Many of the recent contributors, listed above, have just joined. You can do it too! Create your account here.

You can read a brief introduction about this wiki at explain xkcd. Feel free to sign up for an account and contribute to the wiki! We need explanations for comics, characters, themes and everything in between. If it is referenced in an xkcd web comic, it should be here.

• If you're new to wikis like this, see how to edit wiki pages. There's also a handy wikicode cheatsheet.

• Discussion about the wiki itself happens at the Community portal.

• You can browse the comics from List of all comics or by navigating the category tree at Category:Comics.

• There are incomplete explanations listed here. Feel free to help out by expanding them!

• We sell advertising space to pay for our server costs. To learn more, go here.

Rules

Don't be a jerk. There are a lot of comics that don't have set in stone explanations; feel free to put multiple interpretations in the wiki page for each comic.

If you want to talk about a specific comic, use its discussion page.

Please only submit material directly related to — and helping everyone better understand — xkcd... and of course only submit material that can legally be posted (and freely edited). Off-topic or other inappropriate content is subject to removal or modification at admin discretion, and users who repeatedly post such content will be blocked.

If you need assistance from an admin, post a message to the Admin requests board.