The Bishop and Piece Value
Players meet the bishop, learn that different pieces are worth different amounts, and reinforce that pieces cannot move through one another. They play the pawn game with bishops added.
Ask the group to remind you how the pawn and the queen move. Then introduce today's idea with a question.
So far we have the pawn, the weakest piece, and the queen, the strongest. That already tells us something important: not every piece is worth the same. Today we meet a new piece, the bishop, and we start learning what each piece is worth.
- The bishop moves diagonally only, in any of the four diagonal directions.
- It can move as many empty squares as it wants along a diagonal.
- It cannot jump over other pieces. It stops when blocked.
- Because it moves on diagonals, each bishop stays on one color its entire life. A bishop that starts on a light square is always on light squares.
That last point surprises people. Put a bishop down and slide it a few times, and let students notice out loud that it never touches the other color. It is a nice observation to discover rather than be told.
"Cannot jump over other pieces" is the rule of the day, and it applies to almost every piece. Set up a bishop with a pawn two squares away on its diagonal and show that the bishop must stop before the pawn, or capture it, but can never leap past it. Tomorrow one single piece will break this rule, which makes today's rule worth nailing down now.
Introduce the idea of piece value in plain terms. You are not doing heavy math yet, just planting the numbers.
Every piece is worth a number of points. A pawn is worth 1. A bishop is worth 3, so a bishop is as valuable as three pawns. The queen, the strongest, is worth 9. When you decide whether to trade pieces, these numbers help you know if it is a good deal.
You will fill in the rest of the values as pieces are introduced. By Week 4 there is a full chess math worksheet built around exactly these numbers.
Set up each side with their eight pawns plus their two bishops in the normal starting spots (the bishops sit next to where the king and queen go, but you can simply place them on the back row for now). Play a game with the same goal as before, get a pawn across to promote, but now bishops are in the mix.
- Bishops can capture pawns from a distance along diagonals.
- Players start to protect their pawns and use bishops to control diagonals.
Keep celebrating correct movement over winning. A line that works: "I love how carefully you checked your bishop's diagonal before you moved."