How to Judge a Handmade Chess Set: Wood, Weight, and the Numbers That Matter

In Armenia, chess is not a pastime — it is a school subject. Since 2011, every Armenian child has studied it in the classroom alongside mathematics, in the country that produced Tigran Petrosian, the ninth world champion, and took team gold at the 2006, 2008, and 2012 Chess Olympiads. When a nation plays this much chess, it develops sharp instincts about the board itself: what separates a set that serves three generations from one that warps, chips, and rattles within a few years.

Those instincts can be written down. A quality chess set is not a matter of taste alone — it is a set of measurable properties. Here is what to check before you buy.

Start with the Staunton standard

Almost every serious chess set made since the mid-nineteenth century follows one design: the Staunton pattern, registered in London in 1849 by Nathaniel Cooke and endorsed by Howard Staunton, the strongest player of his era. It won for practical reasons. The pieces are instantly distinguishable at a glance, the wide bases resist tipping, and the compact silhouettes survive decades of handling. FIDE, the international chess federation, still specifies Staunton-style pieces for competition today.

Themed and sculptural sets have their place as art objects — we cover those in our luxury chess set guide. But if the set will actually be played, Staunton proportions are the foundation everything else rests on.

The proportions, in numbers

Sizing is where most cheap sets quietly fail. The reference figures used for tournament play:

There is also a quick field test that requires no ruler: four pawns should fit comfortably inside a single square. If they crowd or overlap, the pieces are too large for the board — and a crowded board is genuinely harder to read mid-game, because pieces visually merge and knights hide behind rooks.

A matched set-and-board is one of the clearest signs a maker understands chess rather than merely woodworking.

Wood, ranked by the job it does

Different parts of a chess set ask different things of the timber.

Boxwood has been the standard for light-colored pieces for over a century, and for one reason: an extremely fine, even grain that holds knife detail. The collar of a bishop or the mane of a knight stays crisp in boxwood where a coarse-grained wood would splinter.

Ebony and rosewood are the traditional premium choices for the dark side — dense, heavy in the hand, with a depth of color no stain reproduces. Many good sets instead use ebonized or stained boxwood for the dark pieces, which is honest and durable as long as the seller says so.

Walnut is the great all-rounder of boards, cases, and full carved sets. Armenian walnut in particular offers dramatic figuring — swirling chocolate-and-honey grain — combined with the stability a playing surface needs. It is the wood our own workshop tradition is built on.

Whatever the species, ask one technical question: was the wood kiln-dried? Timber brought down to roughly 6–8% moisture content before carving is dimensionally stable. Skip this step and the set will answer for it later — hairline cracks along the grain, boards that cup in winter heating season.

Weight is a feature, not an accident

Pick up a king. A well-made piece carries a metal slug — sometimes two or three — set into the base under the felt. This “double” or “triple” weighting can bring a weighted king to two or three times the mass of the bare wood, and it changes everything about play: pieces plant themselves on the square instead of skating, they resist knocks from a passing sleeve, and captures feel deliberate rather than fiddly.

Two checks take ten seconds. First, the base should be finished with real felt or baize, glued flat with no lifting edges. Second, tilt a piece slowly to about thirty degrees and release — a properly weighted piece snaps back upright. One that hesitates or topples has its mass in the wrong place.

Reading the maker’s hand

Machine carving is not a scandal — most respectable mid-range sets are CNC-cut and then hand-finished, and they play perfectly well. But fully hand-carved work sits in a different category, and you can learn to see it.

Compare the two knights of the same color. On a hand-carved set they are brothers, not clones: the flare of the mane, the set of the jaw, the depth of the eye will differ by a fraction of a millimeter. Look for undercuts — places where the carver’s tool passed behind a curl of mane or under a horse’s chin, which rotary machine bits struggle to reach. Under raking light, hand tool work shows tiny crisp facets; machine work sanded smooth shows none.

Finally, ask who made it. A genuine workshop names its master carver without hesitation. Anonymous “artisan crafted” copy, with no person behind it, usually means a factory.

Caring for the set you choose

A wooden chess set wants roughly what a guitar wants: stable humidity somewhere around 40–55%, distance from radiators and direct sun, and a thin coat of wax or wood oil once or twice a year to feed the finish. Store the pieces in their fitted case or wrapped in cloth rather than loose in a drawer, where felt bases grind against carved detail. Do that, and “lasting a lifetime” stops being marketing language and becomes a literal description.

The Armenian answer

Every point above — matched proportions, kiln-dried walnut, weighted and felted bases, a named master behind the carving — describes how chess sets are still made in Armenian workshops today, including the signature line by master craftsman Hrachya Ohanyan that we are proud to carry at LionLaurel. If you are choosing a set meant to outlive you, start there.