Enter Your Reply

If you are like me, you'll lose a piece from your set every now and then.

Then, when enough years go by, and buying more chess sets, you'll
eventually find yourself in possession of a lot of miscellaneous pieces,
making, all in all, for a lot of incomplete chess sets.  It never hurts
to
have lots of Pawns - they can always be put to use in a lot of different
chesslike games.  However, for games like Baroque/Ultima, it makes sense
to modify some of the noble pieces of the first rank so they stand out a
little bit more from the Pinchers ahead of them.  (If I may point out the
obvious, Traditional Baroque/Ultima relies on:

   pairs of Bishops (employed as Imitators/Chameleons)
   pairs of Knights (employed as Leapers) and
   pairs of Rooks (using one for an Immobilizer and one for a
Coordinator)

but the pairing concept of traditional Baroque/Ultima - exemplified in
its
'brothers of arms' kinds of chess pieces - goes out the window when you
rid yourself of the twinning of the Leapers and Imitators, and employ
instead a unique kind of piece for each and every square of the first
rank.  (For instance, replacing the Leaper and Imitator to the right of
the King with a Pusher and Puller.)

As I was in possession of some extra Bishops (conforming to the
universally accepted Staunton design, of course), I modified them into
Pushers and Pullers by sawing off their little split hats (at a point
just
above their collars), and then epoxying some small plastic discs on top,
taking care to keep the things centered. The discs I used were from a
kid's poker chip set but you could use caps off of soda pop bottles, or
shampoo bottles, anything that fits.  Anyway, after I did that, I used
permanent markers to draw PLUS or MINUS marks on them.  It would have
been
nice to have had some black poker chips to work with, so I could have
drawn
the same marks on them in white, but indelible white ink is a little bit
beyond me so I went ahead and used white poker chips on top of the Black
Bishops too.  (When you get used to the colors, they tend to assume a
signiicance all their own.)

The intimate relationship between the King and the Coordinator is easier
to teach to newcomers if the Rook is modified into a Windmill.  As the
King is represented by the piece with the cross, and supposing him to be
the Defender of the Faith, it is easy for the teacher to point at what
must be an invisible Cross that is projected acriss the board, defined
simply by the rank and file that the King sits on.  However, if you
modify
the Rook so it looks like a Windmill with four Fans or Vanes (or Wings,
the
strategic connection between King and Coordinator becomes more
self-evident, especially as they are pieces whose cooperative powers
become effective only through the intersections of their respective 90
degree angles, a student can be introduced to the game more easily.

For most of us who are only hobbyists, the spectre of plastics injection
molding, or casting in acrylics, or drilling things into the sides of
Rooks, is something that scares us away from serious manufacturing. 
It's
better to leave that sort of thing to the professionals.  On the other
hand, maybe there is enough interest out there that we could pool our
resources and manufacture pieces more suitable to Chess Variants?

Now, after reading this long-winded message, does anybody know of a
retail
source where I can buy individual chess pieces separately?  I took a look
at a couple of the links associated with http://www.chessvariants.org but
it looked like most of the sites prefer purchases of entire sets.)