I bemoan how time-consuming 3d-printing can be, but that doesn’t make it any less magical. The Shogi set came out great. I used wood PLA (filament composed 30% of wood) for the two sides of the pieces and marble PLA for the middle accents. Each player only starts with one Rook, Bishop, and King, so I gave them special accents.
Shogi is Japanese chess, and it is mind-bending! If you capture an enemy piece, you can return it to the board as your own on a later turn. Also, most pieces can be promoted, not just the pawns. These rules create two big challenges for the design of the playing pieces. First, both players’ pieces must be the same color because they may end up belonging to the other player. The owner of the piece is denoted by the direction it points rather than by its color. Second, the pieces have to be flat so that they can be flipped over to their promoted side.
In a standard Shogi set, a piece is only differentiated by a kanji (Japanese character) on its face and by a negligible difference in size. For a beginner, it’s impossible to keep track of what’s what. The set I printed alleviates some of the confusion by replacing the difficult-to-distinguish kanji with unique symbols.
