In 1749, François-André Danican Philidor wrote that "the pawns are the soul of chess." The phrase is usually read as strategy: structure decides, the front rank shapes everything behind it. But it can be read literally. If the pawns are the soul, then the rest—rooks, knights, bishops, the king—is the body.

A thought experiment, then: keep the body, and exchange the soul. Eight soldiers from xiàngqí, or eight foot soldiers from shōgi, standing where the pawns once stood. Each carries its own gait, its own way of taking, its own idea of what a front rank owes the pieces behind it. The game around them remains perfectly recognizable. Yet everything is different.

Is such an exchange fair? I don't know—and I have stopped expecting a final answer. Balance, here, is not a theorem waiting for its proof; it is an empirical question without an end. You measure, you adjust, you measure again, and every answer holds only until the next measurement retires it.

But fairness was never quite the point—as long as it's playable, that is the essential thing.