A mother (the queen), and a daughter (the princess). She had been learning to play chess from her mother since she said her first word. It was a hard game, thousands of years old with millions of strategies and possible moves. 

The princess had never won against her mother. She was a master. Just when the daughter would think she was winning, her mother would take it back with a surprise fork or gambit.

One day, the game was different. The princess had the first move, and led with her queen’s pawn to d4. The queen mirrored this, the start of the Queen’s gambit, an infamously risky opening. The princess would lose her pawn if her mom took the bait, but she knew she could come back. This is my game, the princess thought.

As the game progressed, people whispered about what was happening. Their games normally lasted only thirty minutes. After forty five minutes, however, they were only twenty moves in. People from around the town gathered to watch, including the girl’s younger sister and their maid.

The princess was playing brilliantly; she was moving with purpose, like someone who had played the game for fifty years. With every move, it was unclear who had the advantage—both the queen and the princess were playing their best games. 

Eventually, after over an hour of gameplay, the game ended. In a draw. The queen had won every game she had ever played. Everyone around the town was shocked; the queen had been shown up by her daughter, the very person that she had mentored and tutored.

The queen was furious. How could she be the leader of a town if she did not win everything she did. People would not trust her. She decided her only solution was to step down. She got on a boat, the town’s biggest boat used for wars and for shipping, and she told the captain to sail. Sail anywhere. And so he did.

They sailed for almost three months until they stumbled upon new land that had never been explored by the Europeans. It was America. The captain was Christopher Columbus. The former queen wanted to bring her anger out for not winning the chess game, so she influenced Columbus to take over the land. They spent their next years enslaving and massacring the Taíno people of the Dominican where they landed. 

Back in the town, without a queen, they needed to elect someone new to power, and the next person in line was the princess. She was crowned queen the day after her mother left.

Who knew that a simple chess game could change royalty in a town and discover a whole new land for the Europeans, the land that now houses hundreds of millions of people, America.