Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for November, 2024.


The Piececlopedia is intended as a scholarly reference concerning the history and naming conventions of pieces used in Chess variants. But it is not a set of standards concerning what you must call pieces in newly invented games.

Piececlopedia: Raven

Historical notes

The Raven is a combined Rook and Nightrider. It is primarily a Chess problem piece, however, it does appear in Ralph Betza's game The Way of the Knight as a possible promotion. On Jérôme Grimbert's webpage on Fairy Chess pieces, this combination piece is called a Varan (another name for a Monitor Lizard).

Source: George Jellis, A Guide to Variant Chess.

Movement

The Raven combines the moves of the Rook and the Nightrider:

Movement diagram

In the diagram below, the raven can slide to all the squares marked with a black circle, and leap to those squares marked with a white circle.

Raven movment diagram


This is an item in the Piececlopedia: an overview of different (fairy) chess pieces.
Written by Sergey Sirotkin (edited by Peter Aronson). Additional information from Ivan A. Derzhanski. AI image added by Fergus Duniho.
WWW page created: October 3rd, 2001.
WWW page updated: November 22nd, 2024.