Fairy chess piece

Most are symbolised as inverted or rotated icons of the standard pieces in diagrams, and the meanings of these "wildcards" must be defined in each context separately.

[1] The earliest known forms of chess date from the 7th century in Persia (chatrang) and India (chaturanga).

The change of rules occurred in Spain in the end of the 15th century when the queen and the bishop were given the moves they have today.

Leapers that move only to adjacent squares are sometimes called step movers in the context of shogi variants.

The Aanca from the historical game of Grant Acedrex is such a "bent rider": it takes its first step like a ferz and continues outward from that destination like a rook.

The unicorn, from the same game, takes its first step like a knight and continues outward from that destination like a bishop.

The rose, which is used in chess on a really big board, traces out a path of knight moves on an approximate regular octagon: from e1, it can go to g2, h4, g6, e7, c6, b4, c2, and back to e1.

The violent ox and flying dragon from dai shogi (an ancient form of Japanese chess) are a range-2 rook and a range-2 bishop respectively.

The grasshopper moves along the same lines as a queen, hopping over another piece and landing on the square immediately beyond it.

The horse in xiangqi (Chinese chess) is a knight that cannot leap: it can be blocked on the square orthogonally adjacent to it.

The stone general from dai shogi is a ferz that can only move forwards (and therefore is trapped when it reaches the end of the board).

Such a shooting capture is termed igui 居喰い "stationary feeding" in the old Japanese variants where it is common.

The lion in chu shogi, as do the pieces in Marseillais chess, can move twice per turn: such pieces are common in the old Japanese variants of chess, termed shogi variants, where they are called lion moves after the simplest example.

Tamerlane chess and chu shogi allow multiple royals to be created via promotion.

In Ralph Betza's Jupiter army, the Jovian bishop is a Nemesis ferz: it cannot capture, it cannot increase its distance from the enemy king, and it may not be captured (except possibly by the enemy king itself; Betza vacillated on this point).

Some three-dimensional chess variants also exist, such as Raumschach, along with pieces that take advantage of the extra dimension on the board.

In his book The Oxford History of Board Games[18] David Parlett used a notation to describe fairy piece movements.

[19] Capital letters stand for basic leap movements, ranging from single-square orthogonal moves to 3×3 diagonal leaps: Wazir, Ferz, Dabbaba, KNight, Alfil, THreeleaper (ortHogonal), Camel, Zebra, and diaGonal (3,3)-leaper.

For example, WF describes a king, capable of moving one space orthogonally or diagonally.

Standard chess pieces except pawns (which are particularly complex) and knights (which are a basic leap movement) have their own letters available; K = WF, Q = WWFF, B = FF, R = WW.

Example: The standard chess pawn can be described as mfWcfF (ignoring the initial double move).

Note that this table is a special case of the Cartesian coordinate plane, where the origin is always the current location of the piece about to move.

Non-final legs of a multi-leg move also have the option to end on an occupied square without disturbing its contents.

(So mafsW is the xiangqi horse, move to an empty W-square, and continue one F-step at 45 degree, and FyafsF is the gryphon.)

Bex notation also introduces a way to describe exotic effects as a step in a longer move.

On an 8×8 board, the standard chess pieces (pawn, knight, bishop, rook, and queen) are usually given values of 1, 3, 3, 5, and 9 respectively.

Three popular compound pieces, the archbishop (BN), chancellor (RN), and amazon (QN), have been estimated to have point values around 8, 8.5, and 12, respectively.

[citation needed] Musketeer Chess,[23] a modern chess variant, has tried to give relatively accurate values of 10 fairy pieces: Hawk, Elephant, Unicorn, Fortress, Dragon, Spider, Leopard, Cannon, Archbishop, Chancellor.

[25] For example, Sbiis Sabian, in a 24-page article, reviewed many existing methods and came-up with his own methodology, inspired from previous trials.

[25] Another progress has been the use of powerful engines: an approach presented by Grandmaster Larry Kaufman has allowed the evaluation of the relative piece values in many situations, e.g. the bishop pair.