Chess Units (Queen, King, Bishop, Knight, Pawn) Unit Guide

The Duchess update introduced the chess-themed unit line: Queen, King, Bishop, Knight and Pawn. The official announcement calls them "powerful new units" that shake up your strategy, and every chess piece you spawn as The Duchess arrives with a shield from The Art Of War and feeds +10 XP to its column artifact. Individual per-piece stat lines have not been published yet — this page tracks the confirmed mechanics and updates as launch information lands.

• Pawns — Stone Chisel spawns a Pawn on a random tile with +20 STR when gained and when it levels up; each new Pawn gives all units +10 STR for each Pawn on the grid.
• All non-Token spawns — shielded by The Art Of War, making them Blitz Armor fuel (break the shield for +1 Budge and +10 Mult).
• Capturing and sacrificing — Usurper grants +50% STR, which applies to chess units as non-Token units.

The chess line is a board-state strategy: the fourth row gives the army room, Stone Chisel turns every level-up into another Pawn, and the Pawn count itself becomes a global STR buff. Keep Pawns alive to compound the buff, and treat shields as resources — a chess unit whose shield breaks through Blitz Armor paid for itself twice.