Devlog #1 - Conception

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!