Ankh-Morpork chess aka Stealth chess

If, like me, you are a fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasy novels, you are certainly familiar with the great city of Ankh-Morpork.

But you may not be aware that Discworld has its own chess variant, referred to as Ankh-Morpork chess or Stealth chess.

I thought of Ankh-Morpork chess when I saw a set listed on eBay as a 'King Arthur' set.

I'm not sure what is especially 'King Arthur' about the design of the pieces, but they made me think immediately of Discworld, and Ankh-Morpork in particular. So the next step is clear, right? Make a board for Ankh-Morpork chess to fit this set!

I decided to use wooden discs (Discworld, get it?) for the 'squares', and also wanted to play a bit with different heights: have king and queen stand on a higher stack of wooden discs, with the height then generally coming down to the sides and centre of the board. 

I'll explain later what the wooden columns on the side are for ...

Rather than paint the board in a single straight colour, I thought I could try and capture the river Ankh as it is described in the novels. Applying brown wood stain in multiple incomplete layers, with flows, swirls and eddies, creates the image I have of the river pretty well. 

And then it was simply a matter of creating disc stacks between 1 and 5 high, gluing discs together, painting them, and gluing them to the board.

As a finishing touch, I added the coat of arms of Ankh-Morpork to the painted columns ...

... and attached these to the corners of the board.

Time to add the pieces! Ankh-Morpork chess has the normal complement of pieces, plus a pair of assassins. Obviously, these assassins weren't part of the set listed on eBay, and I thought long and hard about how to get myself two pairs of assassins that were of a roughly similar design to the other pieces. In the end, I decided to use pieces from my set for hnefatafl (more on this ancient northwestern European group of games here; although they're sometimes referred to as Viking chess or Celtic chess, they're most definitely not related to chess).

And this is what the full set for Ankh-Morpork chess looks like on its custom-made board:

The extra hnefatafl pieces are indeed sort of similar in design, but are clearly a lot smaller. I think that actually makes sense: they're meant to represent assassins, which will act in the background, almost invisible.

I think the various ideas came together well, and the height differences are visible but subtle.

I'm definitely happy with it!