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Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.
Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.
I wouldn't like to underrate your effort and passion, but in my opinion, your designs don't seem to stay in one stylistic line, which makes the whole project to be of lesser aesthetical value, although conceptually it's still interesting. Many of these designs seem to be somewhat overcomplicated, not speaking of their reliability if printed. The pieces should be comfortable to be touched by hand, after all, so ergonomics is a thing here. As a guy who played with hundreds of chess sets during my life, I can speak that a badly designed chess set can ruin the whole experience to the extent that even an interesting game will fully lose its appeal. If the project is actually printed, I doubt if a player can fully enjoy a game played with such chessmen.
I would suggest that leaping pieces, such as the knight would get just their heads, without other elements, following the existing tradition. All other ones must be made of simple geometric shapes, like pawn, rook, etc. Minor details, such as a cut in a bishop's head or rook's bricks are acceptable if they look balanced. There are endless combinations, and they are very simple to be made.
A piece's basement must be noticeably larger than its middle or upper part. Both for stability and aesthetical reasons, a thing ignored by many people who design chess sets.
I generally do not like Staunton design. To me the pieces in it often look disproportional, but they all have stable and large basements.
Chess is a war game. It is already not comfortable for me that there are so many animal chessmen, which make many variants to be somewhat childish, at least in my perception. Why not use names for military ranks, tools, or anything of this sort? But a chess piece, named after furniture is something that can hardly be understood.
I always preferred plastic to wood while playing chess. But when a chess piece can be easily made out of wood without manually carving anything excluding simple parts, it seems to be a strong advantage.
In today's world of AI, it is simpler than ever to design something like a chess piece. I believe that after about a couple of years we will be able to get a complete set of 3d models for any chess variant by just describing how we would like it to be.
I am sorry for my rant on the subject, don't really take it seriously.