King of the Hill is a chess variant. Players win by moving their king to the board's center. I'm designing a KotH chessboard with elevated central squares, making the board itself a physical hill to represent the variant's objective. To complete the chess set, I 3D modelled chess pieces to go with the Hill theme as well.
I started working on designing. After choosing the dimensions of the chessboard, I moved onto the pieces. I incorporated each piece’s traditional symbol, like the queen’s crown and bishop’s mitre, with a King-of-the-Hill-inspired theme. For example, the king is modelled after a flagpole, because people put flags on hills. The knight design has horns like a mountain goat. The rook… is still a castle. Boring, I know, sorry! (see the actual sketches below)
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Next thing I did was some basic research about CAD. I decided to work in Onshape as I heard it was beginner friendly, and I made my first design: a 5x5x2.5 cuboid - one square on the chessboard. My plan is to print out 64 of these in two different colors, then glue them together. I also designed an outside frame for the board, and split it into four pieces for printing. (see the screenshots below)
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Hopefully soon, I’ll head to my local library and see if I can print out the board.
Today I thought of my project idea. As an avid chess player, King of the Hill has always been one of my favorite variants. In KotH, you can win the game by bringing your king to one of the four central squares. I thought of designing a chessboard where the central squares are physically elevated, making the board itself like a hill, to spatially represent the variant’s objective.
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I did some research on typical chessboard specifications, because I want it to be compatible with regular chess pieces too. I settled on a 5cm square width, which gives ~40cm for the whole board’s width. This is on the lower end of tournament regulation size.
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For the squares’ height, I went with 2.5cm, which is definitely on the thicker side for a regular chessboard, but I thought it fitting considering the hill theme and it being exactly half the width. The lower level of elevation will be 5cm high, the upper level 7.5cm high.
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To outline the project’s scope: I want to 3D model a KotH chessboard and also thematic pieces (maybe the king is a climber of some sort?). I’d like the central squares to be expandable/retractable to support regular chess-play alongside KotH. At the end, I want to 3D print and maybe decorate the chess set I design.
See my crude sketching below ⌄ and thank you all for reading!
