Queen (chess) to the announcement of "check". Some published rules even required this announcement before the queen could be legally captured. This custom was largely abandoned in the 19th century. In Russia for a long time the queen could also move like a knight; some players disapproved of this ability to "gallop like the horse" (knight). The book "A History of Chess" by H.J.R. Murray, page 384, says that William Coxe who was in Russia in 1772 saw chess played with the queen also moving like a knight. Such an augmented queen piece is now known as the fairy chess piece "amazon".
Cheating in chess the piece intended to be played should be touched, and taking more than five minutes to move should simply mean defeat. (As chess clocks are "still" practically unknown even in modern India, it was out of question during the middle of 19th century — the period in which the film is set.) In contrast to the modern methods of cheating by playing moves calculated by machines, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the public were hoaxed by the opposite deception in which machines played moves of hidden humans. The first and most famous of the chess automaton hoaxes was The