What 🨁 means
It belongs to neither side. A neutral piece in fairy chess may be moved or captured by either player under variant rules.
Chess-problem composer Thomas Rayner Dawson helped popularize fairy chess and neutral pieces in the early 20th century. Metal type—small printing blocks—let printers turn ordinary chess shapes into variant symbols. Shatranj, an ancestor game of chess, used the ferz, the queen’s predecessor. Chess fonts can draw neutral halves differently.
Don't confuse it with
2Questions people ask
1Why does 🨁 show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
How to type 🨁
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 1FA01, then Alt+X to get 🨁.
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “neutral chess queen”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 1fa01, then Enter or Space.
HTML
🨁CSS
\1FA01Unicode input
Enter U+1FA01 in a Unicode-capable editor or select it from a character picker.
English algebraic notation
In English scores, Q abbreviates a queen move; it is not this character.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
🨁
HTML hex
🨁
CSS content
content: "\1FA01";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%F0%9F%A8%81
1
On screen
1
Code points
2
JS .length
4
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.