Once again unreasonably upset about how in chess the winning condition isn't "capture the opponent's king", it's "put the opponent in a position where any of their moves would cause their king to be captured exactly one turn in the future by a hypothetical perfect-playing opponent", which is functionally the same but infinitely more annoying
@socks given chess has a long and storied history, I wouldn't be surprised if the win condition was originally "capture the king" and it changed over time, presumably because if you were in such a situation you'd just resign anyway
@socks and during typing that out I looked it up; original win conditions were in fact "capture the king" or "leave a player with a bare king" (capture everything else)
the persians introduced check/mate to have a warning for a king being captured, and as a result, to prevent games ending suddenly and accidentally
and the bare king rule fell out of vogue somewhere around the 16th century, because it was considered more noble to win by checkmate
@KS I am not surprised that it was originally like that, checkmate feels really tacked on
@socks (ref: Davidson, Henry; A Short History of Chess)