Car part set

The first set entirely created after I moved to the UK was made from various car parts: spark plugs for the rooks, pieces of tyre for the knights, light bulbs for the bishops, the emblems from our old Opel, who had given up the ghost just before moving to the UK, as queens, and the keys to that Opel as the kings (the key to the game, obviously!). Main pieces all mounted on nuts and painted copper or silver. The pawns were sealed sample vials filled with either cooling fluid (for the white/silver side) or engine oil (for the black/copper side).

The board consisted of Perspex, with the squares separated by pieces of electrical wiring, stretched across the board.

As with several of the previous older chess sets, this set got lost somewhere along the way. All I have to prove it existed is these two pictures, taken with the set sitting on top of the engine of our old trusted Volvo Estate (which has also long ago given up the ghost).

In case you're wondering why the board isn't chequered, and why there is an empty row between the pawns and the major pieces, the board and pieces are set up for Makruk, Thai chess.

Looking back at the set now, I don't think it was my best one. There are some nice ideas (I still like the two sets of pawns having two differently-coloured liquids), but overall it's pretty rough.

First commission!

Following me posting the pictures of my sea shells chess set on Facebook, I was approached by a friend of mine. He was keen to teach his young son to play chess, and really liked my old sea shells set. Would I be willing to make something along the same lines for him and his son?

I was quite pleased with my original sea shells set, so wouldn't mind creating another one. But I don't want to just copy the first one; the second one ought to be quite different, in terms of design of the pieces as well as colours and general design of the board.

But first thing first: collect sea shells! Over the xmas holidays, we went beach-combing several times in order to collect a wide variety of shells (for this set, I only want molluscs). I didn't have clear ideas yet as to what the pawns, rooks, knights, bishops, queens and kings should look like; that would be determined completely by what we could find. To give us the greatest variety of shells to work with, we collected both from shingle and sand beaches near where we live along the south coast.

Couple of hours collecting usually resulted in several containers full!

Not surprisingly given their biology, shells from shingle beaches were mostly gastropods, whereas bivalves were much more common when collecting on sandy beaches.

Methinks, I've got enough to make a set!

As I'm writing this, my ideas as to what shells to use for which piece are starting to take shape. I've not given a time frame to the 'customer'; the set will be ready when it's ready. But you can be sure it will feature in a blog post once it's done; watch this space!

Byzantine chess set

The next set I made started out as a small set on a square 8 x 8 board. The pieces were made from small Dutch 10 cent coins ('dubbeltjes'); the 'white' pieces were not painted, but the 'black' pieces were painted metallic green. The board was made from squares cut from dollar bills.

After moving to the UK, when I became more and more aware of the large number of historical chess variants, I decided to change the board to one used for Byzantine Chess, a circular medieval Persian variant. A circular chess board was carved into, and then painted on, a tree stump, using silver and metallic green paint.

Like several of the older chess sets I made, this set also got lost somewhere along the way, and the two pictures above are the only evidence of it. At least, I think it did ... I'm absolutely sure I didn't take the tree stump with me in every subsequent house move, but I'm not ruling out that the pieces, small as they are, are still hiding in a little box on the attic somewhere. It was a neat little set; the two boards were rather amateurish, but the pieces themselves were fun to create. Should I indeed still have the pieces somewhere, I'll make sure to create a new board for them. Or, if the pieces are truly lost, I may well create another set from small coins in the future.

Xiangqi set

It was Xiangqi, Chinese chess, that first made me aware that there are multiple variants of chess. I was introduced to the game by a friend of mine, 'Mijn Kees', and we played several games with his set. Keen to get my own set, I bought a typical Xiangqi set in a Chinese shop in Leiden: disks with red and green Chinese writing and a folded-up paper board. Board like that works fine if you want to play a game, of course, but I wanted to create something a bit nicer ...

I finally ended up with a board which basically consists of cocktail sticks, lots of cocktail sticks: well over 1000 of them! Yes, it took a lot of time finishing it.

'Mijn Kees' and I used the board a lot when I still lived in the Netherlands, and, for a while after I moved to the UK, I had it out when we played games over email.

Fast forward something like 20 years: I still had the pieces in a drawer, while the board had ended up in the back of the shed, damaged and dirty. It clearly was in need of some TLC!

Time to clean it up, restore it, and, where possible, make it look even nicer than it did originally. Damaged sticks in the 'river' were removed, and the 'river' was given a fresh lick of black paint in order to make it match the black lines of the board better.

I then took the decision to use cocktail sticks for inlaying the 'river' as well, but with their orientation turned 90 degrees compared to the rest of the board. Time had given the original cocktail sticks a somewhat darker colour, which actually worked well as it enhanced the contrast with the 'river'.

Next step was to inlay the two 'palaces', with cocktail sticks at a 45 degree angle to those on the main board.












Edges, made from matchsticks, were cleaned, sanded down, and finally dark-varnished.

Final step in the restoration was to clean up the pieces, and my Xiangqi set had been brought back to life again, looking better than ever!

This being the third chess board I ever made, I'm still pretty chuffed with it close to 30 years later. Very glad that this one did survive!

Glass vial set

My second chess set was mostly made from glass. To be more specific, the pieces were made from various glass vials, tubes and pipettes, which I got from the lab I worked in then. For each of the pieces, I tried to put together tubes of differing sizes such that it captured the 'character' of the piece. The 'white' pieces were left unpainted, whereas the 'black' pieces were made black by pouring black paint into the tubes and vials, and letting that paint slowly flow out along the sides of the vials. For the pipettes, capillary action proved very useful! Painting the pieces on the inside like that created a very nice glossy look.

The board was made from a piece of Perspex, with adhesive black plastic used for the black squares.

I was really happy with how this set turned out! Unfortunately, due to its fragile nature, it did not survive the various house moves, and all that remains of it is the one picture shown above, taken in the snow ...

Sea shells set

The very first chess set I ever made was based on sea shells and other sea creatures. Back then I lived close to the sea, so a few hours searching for sea shells on the Scheveningen beach got me everything I needed. Cockles for the rooks, crab carapaces for the knights (crabs often partly moving sideways matched the move of the knight, I felt), mussels for the bishops, razor shells for the queen and a whelk for the king. Ordinary surf clams for the pawns, and all pieces mounted on draught stones. The 'white' set was painted white, and the 'black' set metallic blue; I felt those colours captured 'the sea'. Board was made from plywood, with the squares painted white and metallic blue.

I was rather pleased with it, to be honest! Sadly, the set is long gone, and all I have left of it are two pictures.

Not ruling out, by the way, that I'll make another chess set from sea shells in the future. It won't be identical to this first one, though!

Chess variants, chess sets, chess creations

Hi there!

Ever since I found out that chess as played under FIDE rules is just one of many many variants, I've been interested in the origin and history of this family of games. This may be partly because I'm an evolutionary biologist; more on that in a future blog post ....

In parallel with this growing interest, I also became interested in designing and making chess sets myself. These creative urges first surfaced something like 30 years ago, when I still lived in the Netherlands. I made a few sets then, and continued to do so for a few years after moving to the UK some years later. Other interests took over for a while, but my chess set creations were rekindled until workload pushed them back yet again. Now that I've gotten my life back workwise, creative juices are slowly starting to flow again. To accompany this 'third wave', I thought I'd create a blog, presenting the sets I made in the past, and taking that to the present.

My intention with this blog is not to offer any of the sets commercially. For me, the fun is in designing and making the pieces and/or the board. Doing the same set twice doesn't have any creative value, at least not to me.

Some of the sets presented in this blog are made entirely myself, some have a board made for existing pieces, and there will also be a few sets in my collection that I got without too much creative input (or none whatsoever!). I'll also throw in some information occasionally on chess variants, and on the origin and early history of the game.

Hope you enjoy!