Bộ Cờ Vua Trung Cổ (Medieval Chess Set)

Chess hasn't always been played by its modern orthodox rules. It's fun to play by the old rules sometimes, and with old-style pieces. Most notably, Medieval Chess featured a vizier and elephants in place of the more powerful modern queen and bishops.

Rules of the Game

Design Notes

These chessmen are in the abstract style of late medieval Northern Europe.

The “authentic” size has 32mm squares and prints on a 270x270mm print bed, whereas the travel size has 21.5mm squares and prints on a 180x180mm bed.

The board prints face-down to produce a surface as smooth and consistent as the print bed itself. I modeled it as a parametric OpenSCAD script, which can actually be used to generate a checkered grid with any number of ranks and files, not just 8x8.

The Prusa Mini version of the travel-size set is specially configured to only require a single manual filament change.

Supports are unnecessary. Since the shapes are inherently more stable than those of modern Staunton-style chessmen, weighting is also unnecessary. Note that the king consists of two parts to be pressed together post-print.

The set in the photograph actually consists of the travel-size pieces on a board with 25mm squares from my Travel Checkers Set.

Suggested Print Settings

• Global

  • Nozzle Size: 0.4mm

  • Wall Generator: Arachne

  • Infill: 15% Cross Hatch

  • Prime Tower: None

• Plate 1 - Chessmen

  • Layer Height: 0.15mm

  • Walls: 3

  • Seam Position: Random

  • Outer Brim: 5mm so they don’t slide around

  • Brim-object gap: 0.2mm for easy separation

  • King (in travel size only)

    • XY Compensation: 0.05mm for contours & holes, to beef up the fragile spindle

Credits

I modeled the board myself. The harder work of the chessman models was done by Victronix. Her work is included here with her permission at 75% of the original scale (or 60% in the travel-size set). The volume of each chessman is roughly proportional to its value.

See Also