Middle Eastern set

Saw this heavy stone set on eBay, in very good condition. There was no information as to its origins, but I liked the design of the pieces, so I took a punt and won the bidding. After posting the picture on a few chess collectors groups on Facebook, it was suggested that the set might be Middle Eastern in origin. One poster suggested possibly Indian, though that was refuted by another poster.

The set came without a board, and not long after getting it, I got this nice marquetry board. Lots of little pieces of wood!

As before, I posted the picture in a few chess collectors groups, and the suggestion was Syrian or Turkish.

So I had a likely Middle Eastern set, and a board probably from the same general region .... why not put them together?

Even though the board and set do not belong together by design, I do feel they really fit together nicely.

Of course, the set can be used to play FIDE chess. But given it's likely origin, I might just as well consider it a set for playing the predecessor of FIDE chess: Shatranj. The pieces are the same in both variants; it's just the moves of several pieces (especially the firz and alfil, the ancestors of the modern queen and bishop, respectively) that are different.

"Terracotta Warriors" set

Saw an unusual xiangqi (Chinese chess) set for very little on eBay, and couldn't resist. The board was basically a rolled-up square of faux leather, and, to make it more of a physical board, I flattened it and glued it to a piece of plywood.

What was unusual in this set was the shape of the pieces. Normally, xiangqi pieces are basically discs, with the name of the pieces written on them in Chinese characters. Have a look at the xiangqi set for which I made a board long ago to see what I mean.

The set I got off eBay has no discs, but three-dimensional pieces, in the style of the terracotta army.

The pieces are made from some sort of resin. The dark pieces are stained dark brown ...

... whereas the light pieces are off-white, stained such as to resemble ivory.

Although it's quite a neat little set (certainly for the price I paid), to me it just feels odd. I used to play xiangqi quite a lot many years ago, and I'm very used to seeing the pieces on the board as discs with Chinese characters. Having three-dimensional figurines as pieces instead makes it harder for me to see patterns, lines of attack, etc. Guess an experienced player of FIDE chess would find it equally strange playing with discs bearing the pieces' symbols!

Four Seasons chess set - summer

Early this year, I decided to create a board and pieces for Four Seasons chess, and do that in such a way that the entire process would be spread over four seasons. At the end of the spring phase, I had made the basic board. That basic board had very broad edges, and my plan was to collect leaves from various trees over the summer, dry-press those leaves and attach them to the edges of the board.

I collected leaves from several tree species in my neighbourhood, trying to capture variety in shape, size and colour. Clockwise from top left, these were: oak, japanese maple, birch and beech.

Played around with different arrangements, until I was happy. And then I glued the leaves to the board.

I do think the board looks nice like this!

No prices for guessing what the next phase will be; you'll get the first hint of what the pieces will look like at the end of autumn!

Staunton set

Recently, my collection of created chess sets and/or boards expanded a bit into vintage chess sets in the form of a Mexican pulpit set. That made me think that my collection would always have a glaring hole if it didn't contain at least one set of Staunton chess pieces. eBay is your friend, and I soon found what I felt was a very nice looking set of weighted pieces; I especially like the knights of this set! It didn't come with a board, but I got a nice carved wooden board off eBay, which complemented the pieces pretty well in terms of size as well as general character.

The eBay listing gave no information on where and when the set was made, so I don't know whether it is truly vintage.

Chess computers

You could argue that the two chess computers I bought long ago also qualify as 'chess sets', so I ought to mentally add them to the collection.

First chess computer I bought is a Saitek Kasparov Simultano.

Got it about 30 years ago, when I still lived in the Netherlands. It still works fine!

The second chess computer I got shortly after I came to Britain; don't remember exactly when, but it must have been at least 20 years ago. This is a Novag Chinese Chess computer, so programmed to play Xiangqi.

Like its FIDE chess playing sibling, it still works flawlessly.












I guess that specialised chess computers like these are pretty much redundant nowadays, with so much chess-playing software available both off-line and on-line. So they add a bit more 'vintage' to the collection, maybe?

Makruk set

Several years ago, I created a set for Makruk (Thai chess), but, other than the line-up of the pieces, there wasn't anything 'Thai' about either the board or the pieces. So I decided to try again, and make a more authentic Makruk set.

Looking for ideas, I quickly stumbled across a set of original plastic Thai Makruk pieces.

With the pieces sorted, the plan was to create a board similar to boards used in Thailand, with space on the side for captured pieces.











But I wanted to it to be unique, so it would have some changes and an extra flourish!

The playing area was going to be raised a wee bit, on top of the base of the board.

The plywood received three coats of mahogany wood stain, and the lines between the squares were chiselled into the wood, creating light lines in the process
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The base of the board received two coats of mahogany wood stain, making it slightly lighter than the playing area itself.

And then the extra flourish! Eight small wooden figurines of elephants, a well-known Thai icon. These elephants will carry the board in a rather discworld-esque way.

The base of the board is screwed on to the backs of the elephants, ...












... and then the playing area is glued to the base of the board.

Finally, the board is finished off with several wooden strips, which are mahogany-stained as well.

Time to add the pieces!

I'm really pleased with how my second attempt at a Makruk set came out!

Chess variants and the origin of chess

If you've been following this blog, you will have seen references to several different chess variants: Xiangqi, Byzantine chess, Makruk, Chaturaji, Shogi, Janggi, Shatar, Klin Zha, Tridimensional chess, Courier chess, Chaturanga.

But these are only the tip of the iceberg: there are, literally, thousands and thousands of chess variants, and more are continuously being thought of by people around the world. If you want to get a feel for this wide range of chess variants, check out the Chess Variants web-site, or the Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants.

With so many chess variants, past and present, in existence, the ultimate question is obviously: where did it all start? Where and when did chess originate, and what did that ancestor of all chess variants look like?

The simple answer is: we don't know, at least not for sure. But what little evidence there is suggests it is most likely that India is the birthplace of chess, possibly in the 6th century. The oldest known form of chess is the Indian game of Chaturanga, which fits with an Indian origin. From India, the game is thought to have travelled west to Persia and then the Arab world, through which it entered Europe (via Spain and/or Italy) in the 10th century. Similarly, under the 'out of India' hypothesis, the game spread east to China, southeast Asia, and Japan. Mind you, there are competing theories, one of them being that chess originated in China, centuries before it arrived in India. Evidence for this 'out-of-China' hypothesis is mostly wishful thinking, though; hard evidence is essentially non-existent. For anyone interested to read deeper into the topic, here is a recent in-depth overview of the available literary and archaeological evidence.

Being an evolutionary biologist by training and profession, I came to see this whole group of chess variants as so many different 'species', all descending from a single ancestor. Just like biological species, chess variants mutate, evolve, and go extinct. To give just one example: the queen in modern chess evolved in the late 15th century from the medieval vizier, which was quite a weak piece. Very quickly, this new "mad woman's chess" spread through Europe, replacing the medieval form of chess, which basically went extinct.

There are sophisticated statistical tools available to try and reconstruct the evolution of a group of species, and I decided to apply some basic 'phylogenetic methods' to chess variants, hoping it would shed some new light on the identity of the ancestor of chess. If you're interested to read the article I published in Board Games Studies, you can download the entire text of volume 3 (which includes my article Origin of Chess - A Phylogenetic Perspective) here; alternatively, drop me a message, and I can email you a scan of the article as a pdf. The bottom line is that the phylogenetic analyses I did also support India as the most likely birthplace of chess, and Chaturanga the most likely ancestor.