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
Fairy chess piece Pieces invented for use in chess variants rather than problems sometimes instead have special icons designed for them, but with some exceptions (the princess, empress, and occasionally amazon), many of these are not used beyond the individual games they were invented for. Today's chess exists because of variations someone made to the rules of an earlier version of the game. For example, the queen we use today was once able to move only a single square in a diagonal direction, a "ferz". Today, this piece still starts next to the king, but has gained new movement and became today's queen.