Chess Piece Essays: A quick rundown

This is an introduction to my attempts at a sort of reclassification of chess pieces. To be honest, I am merely working on some older works of chess piece taxonomy, so I am not going to start from the ground up unless it's a blank that needs filling. 

Usually, all this piece talk is within the context of either fairy/generalized chess or chess variations, but let's assume you have no idea what chess is at all. What makes a piece?

The Humble Piece

A chess piece is a piece that sits on a chessboard square that has a specified vector of movement across the board. This vector dictates which other squares it can go to from the square it is currently on. 

For a chess piece to move, it has to leave the square it sits on and move to one of the possible destination squares. This can be blocked by other pieces or the geography of the board. If a piece is unable to move it does not cease being a piece.

While any Tom, Dick and Harry can place rules of movement for a piece, these essays deal with the ones we can neatly classify. This makes the subject matter a bit of a list of the ways a piece can move in a more or less regular manner.

The Way They Move

If it can only move one square at a time, it's a leaper, if it can make multiple leaps, it's a rider, if its movement in any way requires another piece, it's a hopper. Pieces that combine two or three of these move types are hybrids and are strictly only seen in chess variations.

Assume a distance, if a piece can go in every direction allowed by the distance, then it has full range, otherwise it is limited. E.g. if a piece can move a certain way in one direction but a different way in another, then this piece's range is limited.

Generally, a piece is blocked from a destination square if an allied piece is on it. Depending on the piece it can even block further destination squares.

If an opponent piece is on a destination square, the piece can go to that square and displace the opposing piece, thereby capturing it and causing a stop to the piece's trajectory. There are other ways of capture, but that's a different can of worms so captures in these essays are implied to be displacement captures. 

Some chess variations depend on a piece whose capture can signify a win or loss of specific pieces. In orthodox chess it's the king that must be captured to win. Even if the action of capturing is itself not done, some moves cannot be done upon the implication that it will cause the capture of the king on the next turn. Other pieces can exhibit these same properties and in some cases extra provisions are needed for some class of pieces.

What to Expect

This is simply a sort of amateur attempt to give a consistent taxonomy of pieces that are used in generalized chess. Any names used for some pieces are either based on common parlance or the closest available naming that I can find, creating new names simply a last-ditch effort. As this was initially made as a text-only piece, pictures will be added later but the text won't be edited to reference any diagrams.