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Take a quick survey of the many Chess variants at this site, and you will soon realize that only a fraction can be played with the usual Chess equipment. Many others include extra pieces or are played on non-standard boards. While you can buy sets for some of these games, there are still many more you cannot buy sets for. Besides that, even if commercial sets were available for every variant, it could get ridicuously expensive to buy a separate set for each game you wanted to play. A much more practical solution is to put together a Chess variant construction set, which you can use to put together boards and supply pieces for a wide variety of games. You cannot buy one readymade, but you can put one together.
The idea behind a Chess variant construction set is similar to having something like Legos, Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, or Micronauts, which you can put together into different combinations to make different toys out of. The main ingredients of a Chess variant construction set are Chess pieces and board parts. A good set should include various fairy pieces and a few sets of standard pieces. Board parts will generally consist of single spaces and board segments that can be quickly pieced together into various board shapes.
The construction set you build will probably be different from mine or from any set that someone else builds, but it will do you well to start your set with the following items.
Altogether, this may cost you somewhere between US$84 and US$120. If that's too expensive for you, you can page down for some budget ideas. The two Gothic sets are about $30 each, and the Omega set is about $20. You can order both from their respective websites. The cost for the other sets will depend on what you choose to get. You could buy cheap sets at a dollar store, buy four tournament quality sets, or get something in between. There are trade-offs either way. Small cheap pieces are more portable, and they are better for games which allow multiple occupancy on squares. Tournament quality pieces are of much nicer quality and will fit in better with your Gothic Chess and Omega Chess pieces. Whatever you get, bear in mind that the pieces for Omega Chess and Gothic Chess are black and white plastic pieces, and it will be good to have other sets that match them in color. This will make it easier to use pieces from multiple sets in a single game.
Both Gothic Chess and Omega Chess come with tournament quality pieces. The Omega pieces are of Staunton design, and the Gothic pieces are of Arroyo design, which is similiar to Staunton but more streamlined. Besides giving you full sets of standard pieces, these games give you tournament quality fairy pieces. Omega Chess gives you two Champions and two Wizards for each side, and two Gothic Chess sets give you two Chancellors and two Archbishops for each side. Besides this, the difference in design between both sets allows you to use pieces from one set as additional fairy pieces when needed.
Getting extra Chancellors and Archbishops is only one reason for buying two Gothic Chess sets. An even more important reason is to get two Gothic Chess boards. The boards for Gothic Chess are large tournament sized 8x10 boards made out of floppyboard, which is cloth on rubber, like what mouse pads are made of. Floppyboard can be cut into smaller parts, which can be rearranged into different board shapes. With two Gothic Chess boards, you will have enough material for boards as large as 12x12. Yet with only one board, you wouldn't have enough material for even a 9x9 board, and that would greatly limit the large variants you could make boards for. In cutting up the boards, you should balance ease of use with versatility. You should have enough large pieces to put together many standard sized boards quickly but also have enough small pieces for very odd shaped boards. I recommend cutting your two boards into the segments shown below.
First Board
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Second Board
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I do not recommend any segments with a length of 3 or with a length greater than 4. Lengths of 2 and 4 guarantee that opposite color squares will be on each end, making the segments more useful. Here is how to make various boards out of these pieces. When you make the boards, you should push the segments together. They are shown separated only to make it clear to you which segments go where.
8x8
The standard 8x8 board can be most quickly constructed from the four 4x4 segements. |
9x9
A 9x9 board can be made by adding four 1x4 strips on two sides of an 8x8 board, with a single space added in the corner. |
10x10
A 10x10 board can be made from the four 4x4 segments, four 2x4 segments, and one 2x2 segment. |
11x11
An 11x11 board can be made by adding four 1x4 strips and two 1x2 strips to two sides of a 10x10 board, with a single space added to the corner. |
12x12
A 12x12 board can be made by placing all ten 1x4 segments and two 1x2 segements around a 10x10 board. Place three 1x4 segments on the left and right sides, and two 1x4 segments plus a 1x2 segment on the near and far sides. |
Omega Chess
An Omega Chess board can be made from adding a single space to each corner of a 10x10 board. Although I highly recommend getting an Omega Chess set for the sake of its nice pieces, it comes with a folding cardboard board that is not as nice to use as a good set of floppyboard segments. |
Because a variety of games can make good use of boards with three colors, I recommend getting an additional floppyboard with a different color for the dark squares. The Gothic Chess boards are green and buff colored. You can get other colors on 8x8 boards directly from floppyboard. Black and buff boards are available, and blue and buff boards may be available too. I recommend cutting it up like so:
The main use for this extra material is to mix with the main green and buff material to make three-color boards or to distinguish some areas of your board. Here are some samples of what you can do.
Cavalier Chess
A Cavalier Chess board can be made by interlacing 1x4 strips of alternating colors. |
Grand Cavalier Chess
A Grand Cavalier Chess board can be made by interlacing 1x4 strips and 1x2 strips of alternate colors. Each of its ten rows would have two 1x4 strips and one 1x2 strip. You would alternate color on a row by row basis. |
Jumping Chess
A Jumping Chess board can be made by adding a different color trim around an 8x8 board. |
Philosopher's Chess
The mind board in Philosopher's Chess can be represented by the alternately colored 2x2 block. |
Fusion Diamond 41
Although this pattern for a 41 square diamond shaped board does not use three colors, it does use all nine light colored single spaces, five of which come from the alternate colored board. |
Vyrémorn Chess
This pattern uses all four 4x4 segments, two 2x4 segments, five 1x4 segments, and one 1x2 segment from the green/buff material and seven 1x4 strips and one 1x2 strip from the extra material. |
One good way for representing fairy pieces in a game is to use standard pieces of different designs. So it will be worthwhile to collect Chess sets of different designs. It is also worthwhile to buy several sets of really cheap pieces, such as you may find in a dollar store or discount store. These will come in handy for large variants with many pieces, and many sets of small pieces can be stored together in a single container. For example, I have six sets from Dollar Zone all in a single Spacemaker box.
You may also find it worthwhile to collect sets for variants besides Omega Chess and Gothic Chess. There are others, such as Cardinals Super Chess, which come with fairy pieces. However, among the commerical variants I know of, Gothic and Omega are the best value for your money. Other sets tend to be very expensive, or have unimpressive pieces, either in design or in material. There are also three-player and four-player variants with pieces in more colors than just black and white.
You can make additional fairy pieces out of wood shapes, which you can buy in a craft store. I have found some shapes that are well-suited to certain pieces, such as a semi-sphere for a Bomb piece or a sphere on a cone (like a stylized Jester's cap) for a Jester piece. You can paint wood shapes with acrylic paint that matches the color of your other pieces. You may also make pieces out of small plastic toys, such as animal figures or military figures. If they're not the colors you need, you can paint them with acrylic paint. My set includes some elephants and some ninjas in various poses, including several archers, which I can use in Yáng Qí.
When I first conceived of the idea of a Chess variant construction set, I began with posterboard tiles and poker chip pieces. I cut squares out of different colored sheets of posterboard. These could be pieced into boards of various shapes, and I would place transparent plastic sheets on top to hold everything in place. This was very versatile and cheap, but it was also time consuming to put together a single board. David Howe improved on this idea by laminating posterboard tiles into larger sections. He later bought some floppyboards and cut them into various sized segments. He and I now normally use the floppyboard segments for boards, and we use the posterboard tiles mainly for marking spaces in Knightmare Chess, which we play a lot. Still, posterboard tiles do have more versatility than floppyboard, because you can mark posterboard tiles for use with particular games. For example, I have tiles specially made for Smess and Chinese Chess.
I bought several sets of 100 poker chips for $1 apiece at a discount store, and I borrowed the idea of disk-shaped pieces from Chinese Chess. I originally drew pictures of pieces on round label stickers and put them on poker chips. Later on, I glued print-outs of piece images onto poker chips, which looked a lot more professional. I did this first for Sentai Chess, then for Chinese Chess. Although I don't use most of my poker chip pieces, I do use them for Chinese Chess. David Howe glued several print-outs of piece images onto wood disks. These have come in handy for games with several fairy pieces, such as Al-Ces.
The concept was conceived by Fergus Duniho, who made the first set out of posterboard tiles, poker chip pieces, some cheap Chess sets, and his original Chess set. David Howe improved on Fergus Duniho's ideas in several ways, particularly concerning the contruction of boards. David also bought several Chess variant sets and made use of them in games with Fergus. Fergus drew on his experience with his and David's sets to compile these recommendations for putting together a Chess Variant Construction Set.
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Created on: November 10, 2001. Last modified on: November 11, 2001.
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The Chess Variant Pages
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Last modified: Monday, December 22, 2008
