Piece gallery
Each player starts a chess game with 16 pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights and eight pawns. This page shows each piece, its letter in notation, its usual value and how it moves. Pick a piece and click any square to see where it can go from there.
From d4 the knight can move to 8 squares on an empty board. Click a square to put it there.
Knight
- Each player has
- 2
- Letter
- N
- Usual value
- 3
How it moves. To the nearest square that is not on the same rank, file or diagonal: two squares one way and one square to the side.
- The knight is the only piece that can jump over others.
- Every move takes it to a square of the other colour.
White's knights start on b1 and g1.
How to use it
- Choose a piece. The board shows it on a square with a dot on every square it can move to when nothing is in its way.
- Click another square to put the piece there. A piece near the edge or in a corner reaches fewer squares than one in the middle.
- For the pawn, dots are the squares it can move to and rings are the squares it can capture on: the pawn is the only piece that captures differently from the way it moves.
Source: FIDE Laws of Chess taking effect from 1 January 2023 (Articles 2 and 3), read on 2026-11-11. Chesspedition is not affiliated with FIDE.
Questions
- What are the chess pieces worth?
- The usual teaching values are pawn 1, knight 3, bishop 3, rook 5 and queen 9. They are a rule of thumb for judging exchanges, not part of the rules, and the king has no value because it is never captured.
- Which piece is the strongest?
- The queen. She moves like a rook and a bishop combined: any number of squares along a rank, a file or a diagonal.
- Which pieces can jump over others?
- Only the knight. The bishop, the rook and the queen are stopped by any piece in their way, and castling is the one move in which a rook passes over the king.
- Why is the knight written N?
- Because K is already used for the king. In notation the pieces are K, Q, R, B and N, and a pawn move is written with no letter at all.
- What happens when a pawn reaches the other end?
- It must be exchanged at once for a queen, rook, bishop or knight of the same colour. This is called promotion, and the choice does not depend on which pieces have been captured.