Greybishop's Board: Another Round...

The nice thing about this blog (to me, at least) is that it's not always necessary for me to have something important to say. Sometimes I just feel like showing you something neat. This is one of those posts.

I spent almost 3 years building my chess sets from little 1 inch tabletop miniatures. I painstakingly primed and painted each figure and I am still pretty proud of what I accomplished. As I mentioned previously, had I known of Hero Forge and the ability to have custom figures 3D printed back then, the line up would have been a helluva lot easier to make up. I had to customize a bunch of figures and sometimes I had to compromise on which character would end up as what piece since not every character I wanted to use was available.

Initially my idea had been to have heroes as the back row of King, Queen, Rooks, Bishops and Knights with their sidekicks as their individual pawns. I wanted Robin as Batman's Pawn, Wondergirl as Wonder Woman's, etc. For the most part it worked out that way but not all the original ideas came to fruition. For instance, I never did find and Aquaman and/or Aqualad figure. I ended up with Hawkman and Hawkgirl as Rooks and a few other substitutions.

Hero Forge could have helped. Since I've discovered it, I've toyed with the idea of a new set of sets and I may at the least use it for extra pieces for my eventual Star Trek set. Thing is, each piece runs $20-30 USD for an unpainted character and if you choose to buy one fully coloured, that's $45 each. 32 chess pieces at those prices is just out of the budget unless I hit the lottery. And that's before shipping.

Still, I could finally get that Aquaman...

And not one but TWO Aqualads, depending on if I want to go classic:

Or modern:

I would also have had some more flexibility in choosing the villains for the sets.

I could have had a Felix Faust figure:

And I wouldn't have had to modify a figure to end up with Cheetah on the villain's Pawn line:

A couple other DC Characters that I might have considered back then that might have been interesting choices for chess pieces:

Bumble-Bee. One of the other ideas I had was Justice League characters as the back row and Teen Titans as the Pawns.

Had I not had a Martian Manhunter to use as the King (that Superman is NOT the King is a discussion I had long and often and if you really want to understand my thinking, you can read my reasoning in my still up on the 'net Chess Set Blog, link to the left) I might have considered a Spectre for the role.

While I did have a fine Joker figure that ended up on the board, I rather like the version I've created over at Hero Forge:

While I did end up with Lex Luthor as the Villain's King, I had to settle for a version of him in a business suit, admittedly the more appropriate attire for the King. Still, I'd have used Darkseid as the King if I could have found a version of Lex in his Power Suit: