Form follows move
The 1924 original replaced kings and knights with geometry: each piece shaped by how it moves. Our set keeps the thesis and re-derives every form from scratch, on the grounds that an argument this good deserves to be had twice.
The bishop is a diagonal wedge, the rook a plain cube, the knight an L of two glued blocks, the queen a sphere on a cylinder — omnidirectional, dominant. The pawn is the smallest turnable cylinder that still feels like a decision when you push it. Beech throughout; the third colour marks the four centre squares, the only squares the rules themselves privilege.
Learning chess by looking
- Set the board with the pieces facing a beginner.
- Explain nothing.
- Time how long before they infer the bishop.
Median across our test group of forty: under three minutes. The set ships flat in a birch box whose lid is the board, and the box lid's grid is silkscreened fractionally off-centre — our one concession to the fact that perfect symmetry photographs worse than it plays.