Play › Guides › The Six Identities
Every piece is a mix of these six. Knowing each one’s habits is how you read the mix.
Because a piece is a blend of identities, you can’t evaluate it the way you would a classical piece. Instead you learn what each of the six possibilities contributes to the blend — how far it lets the piece touch, what it’s worth if the piece dies as that type, and how eager the game is to confirm or delete it. The single most important fact underneath all of it is the value order, low to high: Pawn < Knight < Bishop < Rook < Queen < King. That ladder decides who touches how far, who sheds first under a zap, and who a capture records. Here is each rung.
Play and watch the blur collapse →
Pawn is the floor of the value ladder, and that makes it quietly powerful in two ways. First, a piece touches as its cheapest surviving identity, so a piece that might still be a Pawn only ever pokes one square — harmless as an attacker but also nearly impossible to read. Second, captures collapse a victim to its cheapest possibility, so any piece that still holds Pawn dies as a Pawn when taken. That is why fresh, un-zapped pieces are worth so little to capture and so much to strip. Pawn is also the only identity with a direction and a promotion rank, which is what makes the special moves in Special Moves possible.
The Knight is the only identity whose signature move — the L-shaped jump — no other type can imitate. Jump once and the piece is a Knight, full stop, forever. That total collapse sounds like a loss of mystery, and it is, but a confirmed Knight is your best artillery: it touches with real Knight reach, it can never be zapped down (there is nothing above Pawn left to shed except its life), and it’s cheap to lose. Committing a piece to Knight is often the correct way to arm it. More on that in Opening Principles.
A diagonal slide of two or more squares can only be a Bishop or a Queen, so it narrows a piece to those two at a stroke. Bishop sits in the middle of the ladder: valuable enough that a zap will strip it before Pawn or Knight, cheap enough that it isn’t the last thing to go. A piece confirmed as Bishop-or-Queen is a real threat — and a real target — because the Queen possibility inside it is the second most valuable thing on the board.
A straight slide of two or more squares means Rook or Queen. Rooks share the Queen’s orthogonal lines, so many “quiet” straight developing moves keep both alive along with Pawn, revealing very little. That makes straight pushes the cheapest way to gain space without defining a piece — the quantum equivalent of a developing move. Rook also matters late: castling works on any two back-rank pieces that still might be Rook and King, no starting squares required (see Special Moves).
Queen is the second-highest rung, and it behaves like it. It moves like a Rook or a Bishop, so almost any long slide keeps Queen alive as a possibility — which means Queen lingers on many pieces long after cheaper identities are gone. Under a zap, Queen is the first thing to fall once King is protected or absent, so a heavily probed piece often ends up as a bare Rook-or-Bishop with its Queen peeled away. When you finally capture such a piece after enough zaps, you can force it to die as something expensive rather than as a Pawn.
King is the top of the ladder and the only identity you actually win or lose by. It is the first possibility a zap tries to remove — but it is also protected: a zap can strip King from a piece while another maybe-King remains, yet it can never remove a team’s final King possibility, falling through to Queen instead (the “King Guard” safeguard). Because King is never randomly placed and never truly gone until checkmate, the whole endgame is a hunt to concentrate the royal identity onto one revealed piece. That hunt has its own guide: Hunting the King.
Put it together and a piece’s possibility list tells you three things instantly: its reach (the cheapest identity it still holds), its capture value (also the cheapest identity — captures take from the bottom), and its zap exposure (the most valuable identity it can cleanly shed — zaps take from the top). A fresh six-way blur touches like a pawn, dies like a pawn, and sheds like a king. Collapse it well and every one of those numbers moves in your favor.