Pawn (chess) Pawn (chess) The pawn (♙,♟) is the most numerous piece in the game of chess, and in most circumstances, also the weakest. It historically represents infantry, or more particularly, armed peasants or pikemen. Each player begins a game with eight pawns, one on each square of the immediately in front of the other pieces. (The white pawns start on a2, b2, c2, d2, e2, f2, g2, h2; the black pawns start on a7, b7, c7, d7. e7, f7, g7, h7.) Individual pawns are referred to by the on which they stand. For example, one speaks of "White's f-pawn" or "Black's
Courier chess that there was no consistency as to which squares were dark. The more frequent practice seems to be that the square at each player's lower-right is white. The winning objective is the same as modern chess: to checkmate the enemy king. The pieces are as follows: At the start of the game each player must move his rook pawns, his queen pawn, and his queen two squares forward (see top diagram). Such a two-square leap along a file was called a "Freudensprung" (English: "joy-leap"). Wirnt von Gravenberg, writing early in the thirteenth century, mentioned the Courier Game in his poem