chess piece, game piece used for playing chess. Chess pieces are distinguished by appearance and made of rigid material such as wood, ivory, or plastic. Pieces are of contrasting colours, commonly white and black. The six different types of pieces are: king, rook, bishop, queen, knight, and pawn.More than 500 different patterns of chess pieces have been recorded. These, like the game itself, are probably derived from the 'four arms' of the Indian army—i.e., chariots, elephants, horses, and infantry—although the stumpy, angular shapes of early pieces were variously misinterpreted in the game’s long journey westward. The grading of pieces by modeling them into recognizable figures developed gradually in about the 11th century. Each chess-playing country produced its own designs and these were usually naturalistic, except where Muslim rule restricted them to symmetrical shapes that would avoid representation of man or animal, or where considerations of cost limited them to simple wood turnings. The queen was a European interpretation of the raja’s vizier, and the bishop of the English set (the original elephant) appeared in other European countries in entirely different guises, such as a jester in France.