Shogi set

Next to FIDE chess and Xiangqi (Chinese chess), Shogi (Japanese chess) is the third of the three 'big' chess variants. As I had already made sets for the first two, I obviously needed to make a Shogi set as well, to complete the 'big three'.

My Shogi set was made entirely from cork: tiles and squares cut from cork tiles to create the board, whereas the pieces were cut from bottle corks, subsequently painted (a different colour for each different piece), and with their Japanese symbol painted on them. As Shogi and some of its variants are unique in that captured pieces become the property of the capturer and can be reintroduced onto the board ('dropped'), the pieces are not differentiated into 'black' and 'white'. Rather, the ownership of a piece is indicated by the direction it's pointing in.

This shogi set was the final set in the 'first wave' of me creating chess sets. This first wave roughly coincided with the 1990s, when, as I said earlier, other interests took over. As is the case with (almost) all the chess sets I made so many years ago, this Shogi set is lost. Looking back at the one remaining picture now, taken while it was 'embedded' in a Japanese maple, I'm not too sad it's no longer in existence. Too cheap and gaudy with the differently coloured pieces. I've got ideas for creating another Shogi set or board, which is more Japanese-styled; watch this space!

Chaturaji set

Normally, a chess board is a horizontal surface on which the pieces stand, right? But there is no reason why a chess board can't be vertical! With that in mind, I created a 'board' consisting of a square of chicken wire fence, criss-crossed by yellow and brown wool threads. The playing 'squares' are where threads of the same colour cross, and the pieces were to be 'hanging' from the board rather then standing on it.

I decided to create this vertical set for Chaturaji, an old Indian chess variant, played by four people. For the pieces I made models of insects and other arthropods from metal rings, screws, nails and hooks, in various sizes. Idea was that they would be 'crawling' over the hanging 'web' on the board.

Pawns were ants, rooks were grasshoppers, knights were butterflies, elephants were beetles, and the king was a scorpion (Chaturaji had neither a queen, nor a ferz, its predecessor). Painted in yellow, beige, light and dark brown, each piece had a little hook at the back to hang it from the chicken wire.

The story of the fate of this set is probably familiar to anyone who has followed my blog: no idea when and where I lost it. I'm not too sad about that one not surviving; it was a fun one to design, think through, and build, but certainly not the best set I ever made.

Whisky set

The creator of this set wasn't me. It was a birthday present one year from a friend of mine, Christine Müller, who has since passed away. By making this 'whisky set', she combined my interest in creating chess sets with our mutual interest in whisky.

The pieces consisted of either miniature bottles of whisky, or the wee boxes they came in, topped with gold or silver painted potpourri; pawns were whisky bottle caps, gold-coloured or painted silver. The board was painted with gold and black squares, and varnished to high gloss.

Yes, all past tense .... I have no idea what happened to the set ... another one that didn't make it through repeated house moves ... I do hope I drunk the whisky, though!