Three player chess

Because I couldn't just build a simple chess board

I chose this project because I always wanted to make a proper and beautiful chess set. I got to practice some interesting woodwork and learn the lathe. It took me about 150 hours over many weeks. The result is a unique handcrafted piece, with a solid 3 player board, a piece holder that is also the regular board and 3 teams of imperfect chessmen. I designed both boards in two halves in order to make them more portable and embedded magnets to hold them together. I designed the pieces to be quite traditional and for each of the main pieces to have some extra modification after the lathe.

You can learn the rules from this video.

I used CNC to make the strange quadrilateral shaped tiles out of some Jarrah and Marri placks. The board is designed by drawing lines between evenly spaced points along the sides and center lines of a hexagon. After modeling the board I arranged all the modeled tiles into the shapes of my timber planks. I did the CAM in Fusion 360 and then milled it out on a symbiosis mill. I left stock on the bottom of the board and then ran each board through the bandsaw to separate the tiles from the board.

Assembling the board was like solving a strange but cool jigsaw puzzle with a lot of symmetry. Then I had a very complicated glue up to create the two board halves. I had to make a few jigs that translated between the hexagonal shape of the board and the orthogonal geometry needed for clamping. I glued the tiles to a plywood board for some extra support. To complete the board I added a felt bottom and a Marri boarder from some of my leftover scraps because I love the wavy look of the Marri grain. I also routed a 1mm channel halfway up the side of the board so that I could fold the felt base up in between the board and the boarder. This concealed the edge of the felt and made it less likely to peel off. Then I glued the felt and boarder on with Mod Podge and PVA.

After glueing, the joining edge of the board halves was not completely straight due to the complexity of the glue up. I fixed this by cutting off an unnoticeable amount with the track saw. I also sanded the top flat with the orbital sander, which took a while because of a height difference between the Jarrah and Marri tiles. I drilled four holes for magnets in the two sides of the board and then glued the magnets and wood plugs in.

To finish the board I used 3 coats of Tung oil, sanding with 800 grit between each. Each coat left the surface slightly streaky so I sanded to 1200 on the final coat of Tung oil.

I also wanted my pieces to be weighted so I used broken 6mm carbide endmills from the mill (because we have a lot of broken ones). To break the carbide to useable lengths I used a hammer and vice because it was too hard to cut easily. I made a jig to hold the pieces while I drilled a hole for the carbide. Then I used hot glue to seal the hole and make the base flat.

To finish the pieces, I added matching brown felt to all the bases so that they would be quite to place and not scratch the board (and look stylish).