Paper Chess Set

Paper Chess by Kell Black would make the perfect holiday gift for a crafty chess-playing friend or teen. There have been a couple interviews (see "APSU Artist Releases Book of Paper Chess Pieces" and "APSU Professor Engineers Paper Chess Set for Ivy Press in England") with designer Black, an art professor at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, who talks about how he fell in love with paper foldouts when he built a paper medieval village with his father at the age of five. The difficulty with chess (as Stean and Emms will tell you) is keeping it simple:

“Any designer, any artist, any musician will tell you it’s always easy to add stuff,” [Black] said. “What’s really hard is to take away, to make it as simple as possible. That’s the challenge and that’s what made it so fun.”

For those looking for more of a challenge, there is a nice instruction set available online for making a "Birdbase Chess Set" (PDF) by Joseph Wu, who has also produced a YouTube video showing you how he can make it in 30 seconds (so long as you speed up the video tape!)