Shatar set

A set which didn't receive the slightest bit of creative input from me, but I saw it on eBay and couldn't resist putting in a bid. Turned out I was the only bidder!

Set is one for Shatar, or Mongolian chess. The board is woven from a course type of wool, possibly yak wool?

Pieces are made from resin or something similar. Fun to see the red and orange pawns are different: what looks like rabbits for the orange pawns and something dog-like for the red pawns.

It's quite a small set (the board measures just 25cm square), but a nice one just to have.

Commissioned sea shells set

A few months ago, I wrote about getting my first commission: creating a sea shells set for a friend. I am pleased to announce that that set is now finished, and handed over to the rightful owner.

When designing the set, one thing was clear in my mind: I did not want it to be a copy of the first sea shells set I made many years ago. Of course, using some of the same shells was unavoidable, but I wanted to make sure it looked quite different.

For the board, I decided on white and red squares, with quite wide black edges. Extra ornamentation in those edges comes from four cockle shells at the corners of the board.

                                                                     

Shells for all the pieces are mounted on wooden discs, using some clay where necessary. Pieces are painted silver and gold, as I felt that would set them off nicely on the red and white squares of the board.

So which shells are for which pieces? Slipper shells are used as the pawns:












The rooks are made of cockles:

Knights appear in the shape of whelks:

The bishops consist of two pairs of mussels each:

Piddocks, also known as 'Angel Wings', make up the queens:

And, finally, the kings are made from razor shells:












I do think the full set looks pretty good!

Even though many of the shells used are the same in this and my earlier sea shells set (cockles, mussels, whelks and razor shells feature in both), the whole looks quite different, which is exactly what I intended.

I think it's safe to say that my friend was very pleased with the set! And his son couldn't wait playing a game with it.

Guys, enjoy it!

Travel set

This wee wooden travel set did not involve any creation from my side.

I got it as a thank-you present from one of my PhD students after he had successfully defended his thesis. The set is really small: just under 13 cm in diameter, with the playing area measuring 8 x 8 cm.

Neat, eh?

Shot glass set

I got this large shot glass chess set as a present from a dear friend in the US. Different pieces are represented by glasses in different shapes, all on a thick glass board.

You know the rules of 'shot glass chess'? If not, the key difference with 'normal' chess is that the side making a capture has to drink the contents of the captured piece before continuing the game. Typically, the glasses are filled with clear and coloured spirits; in this particular case ...

... gin ...

... and whisky.

The set actually featured in Whisky Magazine, in an article reporting my attempt to play shot glass chess against a computer. For that, I played 'white', and had to drink the content of any whisky-filled piece I captured. As the computer (a Saitek Kasparov Simultano, if anyone wants to know) obviously can't drink anything and get inebriated, the 'white' pieces were filled with water, and the 'shot glass' effect was simulated by lowering the playing level each time it made a capture.

I did win the game! Quite possibly, the first ever shot glass chess game against a computer? If anyone wants a scan of the article in pdf-format, with the entire game score as well as the blind tasting that was part of the game, drop me a message.

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!