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The grasshopper is a fairy chess piece that moves along ranks, files, and diagonals (as a queen) but only by hopping over another piece. The piece to be hopped may be any distance away, but the grasshopper must land on the square immediately beyond it in the same direction. If there is no piece to hop over, it cannot move. If the square beyond a piece is occupied by a piece of the opposite color, the grasshopper can capture that piece. The grasshopper may jump over pieces of either color; the piece being jumped over is unaffected.
The grasshopper was introduced by T. R. Dawson in 1913 in problems published in the Cheltenham Examiner newspaper. It is one of the most popular fairy pieces used in chess problems.[1]
In this article, the grasshopper is shown as an inverted queen with notation G.
- ^ Dickins (1971), p. 8: "This, the commonest and most familiar of the Fairy Pieces, was invented by T. R. Dawson at the end of 1912, the first G Problem being published in the Cheltenham Examiner, 3rd July 1913. [...] Some thousands of problems using Grasshoppers have been published."