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John Davis wrote: "Hobby Lobby sells checkered fabric with 2 1/2 inch squares. It's 17 squares across and as long as you want. For pieces, printing out your favorite graphics and glueing them to poker chips is the easiest."

Thanks for the reply, John. By a websearch, I've seen that Hobby Lobby's online store does business with a very large number of countries outside of the USA.

The vast majority of CVs would seem to use square or rectangular shaped boards, so the checkered fabric would seem to be potentially quite a useful resource, say for use in [school] clubs. The use of poker chips plus glued-on printouts for pieces would certainly be alright for school sets, IMHO. Future CV club(s) with adults might be more finicky about wanting to have 3 dimensional pieces with their CV boards, at least after some time passes, I'd guess, but by then the club(s) would have a body of members that might be willing to pay (through any increased membership dues) for 3D CV pieces, if there are insufficient said pieces available to the club(s) otherwise. A problem with my theory there, though, is that 3D CV pieces still seem quite expensive, especially if a large number are to be bought (not to mention what happens if at least some of the said pieces are eventually broken or 'lost'). Maybe there's another way out, though, if a 3D printer can be used to produce 3D CV pieces cheaply (or there's CVP's ideas for homemade 3D CV pieces made in an old-fashioned way - in particular, altering existing plastic 3D chess pieces).

[edit: Googling the search term "3d printing chess variant pieces" seems to yield some interesting results.]