At the same time, last week, I went up to Cleveland to move the last of the furniture out of my parents' garage. While there, I held a quick garage sale to get rid of some of the nicer pieces on Craigslist and put the money toward a nice, basic set of wooden pieces.
Today my order from The House of Staunton arrived. I order the Championship Chessmen (their entry-level set) in Boxwood and Ebonized Boxwood. Unboxing follows:
The box was reassuringly heavy for its size. The custom HoS wet tape was a nice touch.
Lots of Peanuts
Beneath all the peanuts . . . a smaller box!
The King is 3.75" high. The set as a whole weights 45 oz -- nice and heavy. Big difference in heft between these and my old plastic set. The general style of the set is the "European Pattern" version of the Staunton Chessmen. The knights are a little funky looking, but I like them. Since entry-level sets aren't going to give you highly detailed knights, they opted for a more minimalist approach.
The pieces set-up on my green and white roll-up board. I might end up getting a new, el-cheepo vinyl board as the mouse-pad texture of this board is almost a little too grippy. I'm saving up for a nice wooden folding board as well.
The pieces in action. Again, the heft is just so nice.
While in Cleveland I also picked up a beat-to-heck platic set of Mandarin chess men. I threw the pieces in with my old plastic set and Will and I play "caputre" -- we set my old set and then put the mandarin pieces in the center of the board three at at time and Will captures them (followed by consoling them that "everybody gets caputred sometime"). The pawns from this old set hang out with his various fisher price construction workers.
BTW: If anyone is up for some correspondence chess on chess.com, let me know.
These look good, man. I am a bit envious! I was looking at some pieces myself when I was playing a bit with Asher this winter, but he seems to have lost interest. I play with a colleague every now and again, but he knows what he is doing, so it boils down to him being confused and confounded by my "tactics" until he realizes that I am blindly shuffling pieces around and trying to trade as many pieces as possible because I like the violence. Once he gets this the game ends somewhat quickly!
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't mind trying chess.com - send me a note on Facebook.
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ReplyDeleteGreat to have you signed-on. Your new chess pieces are really handsome. I, like Ilan played for a while with my kid, but she too has sort of lost interest. But hey, I'm old she's young--she has things to do and I have naps to take.
My personal experience is ADD and chess with your dad is a toxic mix. But he was quite a student of the game.
My next ploy to create an in-house gaming partner is the RPG Call of Cthulu. This could be fun with a few silly 13 year old girls hunting monsters--and going insane ( a very common occurance in the game, it seems).
Great to hear from you.