Travel Chess & Checkers Set

Custom Project - August 2017

I have a very nice Lego Chess Set that features Pirates and Englishmen battling one another, but it takes up quite a bit of shelf space, as well as nearly 30 minifigures, even after I've done a few modifications to it. Currently, I've cut it in half and stacked the two halves together in a 'storage mode', with both 'teams' on top.

After I built my Tic-Tac-Toe board [this one here], though, I thought I'd make a smaller chess set that has each square being 2x2 pips rather than 4x4 (as you can see above). So I made the board itself. Without the border around each 2x2 tile, the board is a much more reasonable size. But reducing the size of each square means that minifigures don't fit very well on them. They are already pretty tightly packed on the full-sized board. 

So I built a chess 'team'. I used a microfig for the King, and built custom tiny pieces for the others. Those are Pawns on the outside, and going inward, Rooks, Knights, Bishops, then the Queen there next to the King. It was a challenge to make them all about that size, but still be distinct enough to play with.

Of course, if I have these pieces, then they need a place to 'live' when they aren't in play. I mean, I could just leave them on the board, but where's the fun in that? So I built a frame to hold both sets of pieces and the board as well. 

 I originally built the frame out of whatever bricks I had at home, but I bought some more black and white bricks, as well as some dark gray pieces, to bring this box together. The bottom two rows of bricks are to make the box deep enough to hold the chess sets. I left a gap in the middle of each side of the top row wide enough to use a finger to pop the top off to get inside.

I made the connections for the top - the board - mostly smooth, so it could be easily removed, but enough pips exposed to lock it down for carrying around. Here's one side with the top removed. The two black pips on either side of the opening - four on each side - are enough to hold the lid securely in place, but still allow pulling it off without tearing it up.

Here's the board all set up to play! I used light gray for the other side simply because I had a microfig that was a duplicate, but of course any color would work. You could, of course, play with the board off the box, but I do like the way it looks all framed out.

However, if you have a chess set, you might as well be prepared to play checkers instead. So I gathered 12-each of a couple of colors of round bits to play with. They're easy to grip, and stack on top of one another solidly as well.

That means, of course, more pieces to store. But we have a box! I built a few compartments into the inside of the box to keep the red chess set, light gray chess set, green checkers, and yellow checkers separate. The checker pieces stack right up to fit in small compartments. I even have some space leftover inside.