Lesson
White to move. Main line: 1. e4 d5 2. exd5 Qxd5 3. Nc3 Qd8 4. Bc4 Nf6 5. Nf3 Bg4 6. h3 Bxf3 7. Qxf3 e6 8. Qxb7 Nbd7 9. Nb5 Rc8 10. Nxa7 Nb6 11. Nxc8 Nxc8 12. d4 Nd6 13. Bb5+ Nxb5 14. Qxb5+ Nd7 15. d5 exd5 16. Be3 Bd6 17. Rd1 Qf6 18. Rxd5 Qg6 19. Bf4 Bxf4 20. Qxd7+ Kf8 21. Qd8#
Scachs d’amor is a poem rather than a tournament score sheet: Castellví plays Mars, Vinyoles plays Venus, and Fenollar comments as the arbiter. Its importance is that the game uses the newly powerful queen and long-range bishop associated with modern chess.
The finish already looks recognizably modern. White opens the d-file, removes the defenders around the king and uses the queen to deliver 21.Qd8#. The queen is not a slow medieval piece here; it decides the attack.
The score is both a game and a historical document. Replaying all 21 moves shows how quickly the expanded powers of the queen and bishop changed the character of chess.
Why 1475 is the dividing line
Chess is far older than this game, but the chess played before it was a slower game. The piece that is now the queen moved one square diagonally, and the bishop jumped exactly two. A game could take fifty moves to reach the sort of contact that now happens by move ten.
Somewhere in fifteenth-century Valencia the two pieces were given the ranges they have today, and the game became sharp enough to be lost in twenty moves. Scachs d’amor is the earliest complete score that survives from after that change, which is why it is treated as the first modern game rather than merely an old one.
A poem, not a scoresheet
The source is a Catalan poem in which three Valencian authors stage the game as an allegory: Castellví plays Mars, Vinyoles plays Venus, and Fenollar supplies the commentary as the arbiter. Each move gets a verse.
That literary frame is worth keeping in mind when reading the moves. This is a demonstration written to show off what the new queen could do, and it demonstrates it well — but it is not evidence of how strong either player was in a serious game.
What the new queen actually does here
Watch the white queen after 7.Qxf3. She takes on b7, comes back to b5 with check, and finishes on d8 — three different sectors of the board in a handful of moves. Under the old rules that journey would have taken most of the game.
The finish is recognizably modern too: White opens the d-file, trades off the defenders around the black king, and mates with 21.Qd8#. A club player today would recognize every step of it.
A rules change can change what a game is. The modern queen did not make chess faster by a little; it made attacking play possible at all.
Open the file your heaviest piece wants, then remove the defenders. That method is older than every opening book.
The oldest surviving score is not the oldest game — only the oldest one somebody wrote down and kept.
Source: Scachs d’amor — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scachs_d%27amor
Source: Francesc Vicent — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesc_Vicent