Chess piece middle game, endings). A for example, is worth half a pawn. In specific circumstances, the values may be quite different: A knight can be more valuable than a queen in a particular decisive attack. Courier Chess, a predecessor of modern chess, used all six chess pieces plus a courier, man (or rath or sage), and jester. Although the symbols for pieces have international standards, the characters implied by pieces' names vary between languages. For example, in many languages, the piece known in English as the "knight" is named a term that translates to "horse". Chess piece A chess piece, or
Rules of chess procedure for determining who plays White. Instead, this decision is left open to tournament-specific rules (e.g. a Swiss system tournament or Round-robin tournament) or, in the case of non-competitive play, mutual agreement, in which case some kind of random choice is often employed. A common method is for one player to conceal a piece (usually a pawn) of each color in either hand; the other player chooses a hand to open, and receives the color of the piece that is revealed. Each type of chess piece has its own method of movement. A piece moves to a vacant square except