The sniper is loaded with a space warp bullet.
When the bullet lodges into the enemy, being potentially healable (if the enemy bishop were to turn priest), the bishop activates the warp, taking the place of the bullet and ripping out of the enemy's body, making sure the body is unusable and making the priest useless.
And that's why we don't have a priest in chess.
Fun fact: rooks are elephant, bishops are camels, and queen is vizier in most Indian languages.
Other fun facts in This article, of which my favorite parts are the maps and their titles:
Do the pieces look different or are they just called a different thing? Like what's a 'jumper'?
They look the same. A "jumper", or "springer" in Danish, is just a differently named "knight".
No, the pieces are the same.
The horse is the jumper because it jumps from one space to the next. And because horses can jump.
Additionally for the other two pieces with significantly different names in the article:
It's so easy to tell this map was made by a Brit. Wales gets its own color (despite largely not speaking Welsh) but Belgium and Switzerland are monochrome (despite having multiple federally recognized and geographically partitioned monolinguistic regions and their own flavors of historical-but-rarely-spoken language)?
Only the Bri'ish would be haughty enough to assume their flavour of federal governance is so unique.
(I don't actually care, it's just very interesting how even such an innocent map actually shows a strong political/cultural bias)
Queen is actually vizier
That's what I said
പക്ഷേ തേര് മന്ത്രി ആന കുതിര ഇങ്ങനെയാണ്
नाही समजलं
Malayalam meh haathi ke badle rathh hothaa he.. Bishop is haathi And there is no camel
TIL
I'd never questioned it before now, but ... How come the towers move? Who had that idea?
The jesters moving diagonally because they're whimsical I guess but the towers are quite odd.
I'll add Spanish! "Alfil", taken from arabic "(al-)fil", taken from persian "pil", meaning "the elephant", since at some point in the past the piece was, evidently, an elephant.
I would have figured Germany would have been the one that changed whatever it was before to bishops in the medieval times on account of how important bishops were for the king/emperor's military.
Okay since nobody did a serious answer, here we go:
tl;dr: its a translation/interpretation error.
The first documented forms of chess are all "war machines" of their time the tower was a Charioteer.
When chess hits Europe someone translated charioteer with tower. Idk why, maybe because the used figures looked like a tower.
And a charioteer move on a battlefield would be a storming through everything in one direction.
Yes. It appears I responded to the wrong comment. I was pointing out they misspelled Cavalry on the Atlas Obscura map.