The queen

The queen (♕,♛) is the most powerful piece in the game of chess, able to move any number of squares vertically, horizontally or diagonally. Each player starts the game with one queen, placed in the middle of the first rank next to the king.

With the chessboard oriented correctly, the white queen starts on a white square and the black queen starts on a black square. (Thus the mnemonics "queen gets her color", "queen on [her] [own] color", or "the dress [queen piece] matches the shoes [square]" (Latin: servat rēgīna colōrem).) In algebraic notation, the white queen starts on d1, while the black queen starts on d8. Because the queen is the strongest piece, a pawn is promoted to a queen in the vast majority of cases.

In the game shatranj, the ancestor of chess that included only male figures, the closest thing to the queen was the “vizier”, a weak piece only able to move or capture one step diagonally and not at all in any other direction. The modern chess queen gained power in the 15th century.