Friday, January 24, 2025

Dragon cloth set

I've got a few Janggi (Korean chess) sets in the collection: one commercial set for which I made a perspex board, one travel set, and a self-made set for a large Janggi variant: Gwangsanghui. Janggi sets available commercially are few and far between, so when I saw a plastic red and blue set for very little, I got it.

The set didn't come with any board, so I had to make that myself, obviously. After rejecting several ideas, I decided on creating a board from cloth, and adding the 'points' on which the game is played by using plastic gaming chips. Found a nice piece of cloth, with dragons, on the internet.


It took little time to measure out and glue the gaming chips on to the cloth, red chips for most of the points, and green for the 'palaces' (Janggi doesn't have rivers).



Time to put the pieces on the board!


I decided to set up the pieces for Gidoncha Janggi, a variant played in North Korea. In this variant, the rook and elephants/ministers have swapped places.