Pawn (chess)

The pawn (♙, ♟) is the most numerous and weakest piece in the game of chess. It may move one square directly forward, it may move two squares directly forward on its first move, and it may capture one square diagonally forward. Each player begins a game with eight pawns, one on each square of their second rank. The white pawns start on a2 through h2; the black pawns start on a7 through h7.

Chess pawns

Quotes

• The Pawn before the King is peace,
    Which he desires to keep at home;
  Practice, the Queen’s, which doth not cease
    Amid the world abroad to roam,
      To find and fall upon each foe
      Whereas his mistress means to go.
  Before the Knight is peril placed,
    Which he, by skipping, overgoes,
  And yet that Pawn can work a cast
    To overthrow his greatest foes;
      The Bishop’s, prudence, prying still
      Which way to work his master’s will.
  The Rooks’ poor Pawns are silly swains,
    Which seldom serve, except by hap,
  And yet those Pawns can lay their trains
    To catch a great man in a trap:
      So that I see sometime a groom
      May not be spared from his room.
  • Nicholas Breton, "The Chess Play" (1593), The Pawns

• The Pawns are the soul of Chess; upon their good or bad arrangement depends the gain or loss of the game.
  • François-André Danican Philidor, translation in Franklin Knowles Young, Chess Generalship (1910), p. 50