Chess has been one of the oldest games known to the Indian subcontinent. With a new wave of Indian Chess players making it big in the World Championship, many have found a newfound interest in playing chess online. Of course, this is no surprise given most people who play didn't pick up chess so much as it was handed to them, at a family table, on a school bench, by someone who learned it the exact same way trying to pass it on.
That kind of shared, inherited memory is what makes chess such an unusual but nevertheless challenging thing to hand a designer anywhere in the world. A knight is always a horse. A king is always a king. The rules and the shapes travel intact even as the materials and the makers change, so when an architect or a sculptor builds a set, they're reworking a concept that already lives in millions of hands and homes, and the real design work happens in the gap between what has to stay recognisable and what changes are fuelled by the creatives. A rook still has to read as a rook, even carved from sand or cast in bronze.
What separates the pieces on this list from a purely decorative object is intent. Some designers are drawing straight from how they grew up playing or understanding the game, letting years spent hunched over a board as a kid shape the form they eventually build. Others aren't thinking about chess at all when they start; the board just becomes a familiar, recognisable canvas for a design idea they already wanted to explore.
Here are 9 designers doing exactly that. Check them out below:
Released in 2014, two years before Zaha Hadid's death, the Field of Towers Chess Set reads like a proper architectural monograph in miniature. Each piece is cast in polished resin as a small tower, an unmistakable extension of Hadid's fluid, angular language, and the full set on the board resembles a cityscape more than a game in progress. It's produced in England by Zaha Hadid Design, the firm run by Woody Yao and Maha Kutay that continues her object and furniture work, in a limited edition of 100, in black or silver, with the board splitting into two halves for storage.
Yoomoota's gaming line treats chess as a platform for world-building and Another Kingdom: Oasis continues that with a palette of soft pinks, purples and earthy tones standing in for two opposing kingdoms. The pieces combine 3D printing, moulding, hand sculpting and acrylic painting, and each set ships with an NFC chip logging its authenticity and provenance digitally. The edition, capped at 21, was shown at PAD Art + Design 2026 in Paris.
Rory Noble-Turner, a Northern Irish architect and interior designer based in London, builds this set using sand 3D-printing, a process that leaves the pieces with the grainy, geological texture most designers spend their time trying to smooth away. The board undulates like a row of dune ridges, and the pieces alternate between rippled and polished surfaces depending on which side is playing. Set up in full, it looks like a stretch of desert terrain with two armies camped on it.
Brazilian designer Jader Almeida usually applies his hand-finishing technique to furniture, balancing industrial manufacturing with detailed handwork, and this chess set for NJF Indústria e Comércio de Móveis gets the same treatment. The board gives up its flat surface for a stepped, faintly dynamic base, and each piece is carved with the precision you'd expect from jewellery. It won the Other Homeware category at the SIT Furniture Design Awards, earned for how convincingly the set holds up as sculpture, independent of whether anyone's actually playing on it.
Shown through Adorno, the Barcelona-based design platform, the Candy Chess Table is cast entirely in resin, finished in a warm, translucent amber straight out of 1960s furniture design. The board sits embedded directly into the tabletop, its pieces split between crystal-clear amber and matte white, playful enough that the table earns its keep as a centrepiece.
Caissa takes its name from chess's mythical muse, a figure who first turns up in sixteenth-century Latin verse and was later popularised in English by the poet William Jones. The set itself is handmade entirely in concrete, made to order, with no two pieces identical, a fairly literal way of treating a material usually associated with permanence and mass production at the scale of a single object, shaped slowly, by hand.
Thai-British designer Srirat Jongsanguandi, trained at the Manchester School of Architecture, built this table low and grounded, worked in textured stone, with wood scented by essential oils and dried flowers folded into the finish. It's built to hold a room the way a good coffee table does, keeping people seated and talking as much as it keeps them playing.
Madheke's 3L Shatranj is handcrafted in India and built to travel: pieces in black matte, black nickel, nickel and brushed brass, a leather-inlaid board set into the reverse of the box lid, and an American walnut case lined in suede. Every special edition ships with a personalised nameplate, a leather-bound book documenting the design process, and a numbered certificate of authentication.
Viraasat's flagship piece is handmade and hand-painted entirely in India, with two opposing armies carved as chess pieces in contrasting orange and red, arranged on a glass-topped board over a sculpted diorama base. What stands out is the production around it: a founders' edition capped at 100 sets, a coffee-table book documenting the design process, and delivery in a leather-strapped trunk within two weeks for orders placed in India, four weeks internationally. It's a rare case of Indian craft sold as a limited-edition collectible instead of a souvenir.