Design failure: chess board

Here is another unnecessary fix of a design with a high degree of functional and aesthetic integrity. Why the designer of this chess set thought the hierarchy of chess pieces, which is fundamental to any chess player’s understanding of the game, should be unnecessarily emphasised by setting each type of piece on a different physical level is unclear to me, unless it was in order to be interesting for about one minute. Not even the classificatory scheme makes sense, as pawns, which are of a value equal to one another, here appear on a different level each.

This chessboard would be supremely awkward to use as the setting for an actual game of chess. Imagine, for example, the difficulty of visualising a bishop’s move of more than one square.