Last night, for no particular reason, I felt like designing my own Lego chess set. So I did.
The Board
Just about every other Lego chess set I’ve seen uses 4x4 or 6x6 for the squares themselves. Maybe it’s just because I wanted to be a little bit different, maybe it’s because I’m just a little bit masochistic, but I decided I wanted to make my squares 3x3. Making them was easy enough, just a 1x1 plate surrounded by 4 1x2 tiles each, but how to connect them was a different story. The only similar thing I had for reference was 76392 Hogwarts Wizard’s Chess–a set I would never have bought had I known what I do now–and ultimately decided on using a bunch of these inverted slopes and long plates before closing everything off with 9 8x8 plates.
Lego did make a 24x24 baseplate once upon a time, but I’m not using it for a few reasons:
- That part was only ever available in old light grey, which doesn’t work with the tan and brown color scheme that I’m using everywhere else.
- I want this to be potentially something I can build in real life (and maybe others too). At the time of this post, Bricklink has exactly two listings of this part anywhere in the world.
Maybe it’s not as efficient as it could be, but it does the job for me; but you can imagine how shocked I was at realizing that I had only just started and have already clocked in 521 parts. Hopefully the pieces themselves will be a little less parts intensive.
The Pawns
The pawns are traditionally the simplest pieces on the board, and here is no exception, being built with just 3 parts each. Originally they were actually just the dome and the ball, but after seeing how tall the other pieces were getting, I was advised to make the pawns a little taller as well; which I did by adding a round brick. They’re definitely stylized and a bit on the chubby side, relatively speaking, but I think they’re still obviously recognizably pawns and that’s good enough for me.
The Knights
The knights are made of 11 parts each. Unlike the pawns (and to an extent, most pieces on a chess board), which are pretty abstract in how they look, the knights are obviously, very recognizably horses, even on the most basic of chess sets. As such, I tackled the knight first to see if my 3x3 scale could actually work. Surprisingly, this wasn’t that difficult to do; I only had to go through a couple revisions (mostly because of parts made in tan but not reddish brown or vice versa), and on this final version I was even able to get a suggestion of a mane.
If I’m being frank, this is probably my favorite piece of the lot.
The Bishops
Other than the pawns, the bishops were the easiest pieces to design, and the next simplest in terms of construction at just 7 parts each. Obviously there’s no way to get the signature slit at this scale, but they’re still pretty recognizable as bishops.
The Rooks
The rooks were by far the most difficult piece to design, and proved to be an even bigger hurdle in making the 3x3 scale work than the knights. Like the knight, the rook’s design makes it very obvious what it’s supposed to be based on; in this case, a small castle or turret. Unlike the knight, I couldn’t think of how to make this shape in a 2x2 area in a way that I liked (40719 Traditional Chess Set does have rooks that would fit in here, but I greatly dislike the way most of the pieces look in that set). I lost count of how many revisions I went through, mostly due to color availability, before talks with a friend led me to settle on this design here. At 17 parts each, the rooks are the most part-intensive pieces on the board.
Despite all the headache, I still don’t like the rooks very much. Easily my least favorite of the pieces I’ve designed.
The Queens
The queens ended up being deceptively easy to design and were a breath of fresh air after the rooks. As mentioned before, I greatly dislike the way most of the pieces in 40719 look, but one thing that set did well was using an upside-down astromech droid head and a stud to represent the queen’s frilly crown. She’s simple, yet elegant, and I quite like her. Each queen is made from 7 parts.
The Kings
After the queen came easily to me, the king actually gave me some trouble; not because he was difficult to design, but because I wasn’t sure how I wanted to design him. In the end, I decided to use the queen as a basis and extend things a bit, ending up with a 9 part build. The base is extended out to 3x3 like the rook and a couple of 2x2 round plates have been added for extra height. In lieu of the cross traditionally seen on the king, I elected to top his head with jewels: blue for white, and red for black. There wasn’t any particular reason for these color choices except I just think they look good.
Castling
A concern I had about making the king’s base 3x3 was how he’d interact with the rook. Thankfully, both pieces have plenty of clearance and shouldn’t clash too much into each other apart from the base.
Final Thoughts
In its current form, this moc features 741 parts (521 for the board, 220 for the 16 game pieces). This was a bigger challenge than I expected it to be, but the result was absolutely worth it. The only thing I could maybe think to add would be an additional spot for one more of each queen in the event of promotions, but that’s not a particularly high priority of mine.
