Rook (chess) of a fifth daughter. Unicode defines two codepoints for rook: ♖ U+2656 White Chess Rook (HTML ♖) ♜ U+265C Black Chess Rook (HTML ♜) Rook (chess) A rook (; ♖,♜) is a piece in the strategy board game of chess. Formerly the piece (from Persian رخ "rokh"/"rukh") was called the "tower", "marquess", "rector", and "comes" . The term "castle" is considered informal, incorrect, or old-fashioned. Each player starts the game with two rooks, one on each of the corner squares on their own side of the board. The white rooks start on squares a1 and h1, while the black rooks
Game of the Three Friends Game of the Three Friends Game of the Three Friends (Chinese: , "Sān-yǒu-qí" ; also called Sanyou Qi or Three Friends Chess) is a three-player variant of the game xiangqi ("Chinese chess"). It was invented by Zheng Jinde (Chinese: , "Zhèng Jìndé") during the Qing Dynasty (1661–1722 AD). The game symbolizes the Three Kingdoms period war (221–264 AD) between the rival states Wei, Shu, and Wu, each vying for control of China after the fall of the Han Dynasty. The Three Friends are represented by colors blue, red, and green, respectively. Each player controls all the standard xiangqi pieces, with