DIY LEGO chess game board and pieces

A while back the kids and I decided to make our own LEGO chess game board and pieces, Here's the story. A couple months ago my son and I were going through the enormous tub of LEGOs, trying to decide what to do with them. We have so many that no one plays with all of them. The pieces from multiple sets are all mixed together. We could build a city, but no real place to keep it without it getting in the way somewhere. So, my brilliant minded child decided we needed to make a chess set out of our LEGOs. This was a really fun family project and a DIY activity that the kids could customize over and over.

Again, sitting around staring at the LEGOs, wondering what to do, I remembered the chess set idea and started digging for pieces. Our first task was to find enough people parts. It took about 3 hours to find enough pieces to make 2 full 16 piece sets to make a chess set that had some kind of coordination going on. We didn't have enough parts to make identical pieces so we decided we didn't want them to completely match anyway.

The play pieces couldn't match exactly, so we matched pant and hat colors and made sure colors for the teams were separate.  We have a red team and a blue team and each has a king and queen. We've got all other pieces built out with their little quirks. Bishops have space helmets, pawns have life jackets, armor and baseball caps. We even tried to give the knights the saddle piece without a horse, but it wouldn't attach to the board (it's only ment to attach to a horse). Some of the players are extra helpful, like pawns with shovels and brooms… because when you battle, you do make a mess. We've even got a camera man in the mix.

What turned out to be the most difficult part was building the board. LEGO sets we have don't seem to have many standard bricks. So, we built the board out of flat pieces. We've got black and then shades of gray and a few white, but it makes sense enough to play a  solid chess game. We finished off the board by adding a little flag to each team's side.

Don't want to build your own LEGO chess set? You can buy a complete set. Check out these LEGO chess sets I found on Amazon.

After a full day of Chess board building, it doesn't even look like we've made a dent in the pile of LEGOs, but at least we finished a project and now the whole family can play with it!

From the look of the player outfits, can you guess which sets we had in our LEGO tub? What's your favorite LEGO build?