Prizewinning puzzle

It has become a tradition to celebrate the annual Chess Game Design Competition on New Year’s Day. Six participating games compete for the audience award. Visitors of the Chessmen Museum have been voting for their favourite design all through 2016. The designs are extremely original and of a high quality this year.

On this cold New Year’s Day, Ridder Dijkshoorn welcomes a museum full of guests to the awards ceremony. He adds some extra excitement to the ceremony by letting artist Felix Albers deliver his speech first. Albers has designed a new kind of chess game called Paco Sako, in which the chess pieces don´t capture each other but move on together in an embrace. This special game, which comes with some rules that are different from the ones in regular chess, is not participating in the design competition. Although the design is finished, the game itself is still in the production process. The Chessmen Museum hopes to put the first Paco Sako game on display this spring.

On to the ceremony. There are some familiar names on the list of participants. Creative souls Kiki van der Heiden and Ivanka Kovacs, for example, have been participating for a couple of years now and Mr F.G. Mellink is also a veteran. The cash prizes are certainly motivating, the first prize being €1000,-, but the creative process of designing and creating is more important to the participants. And, of course, so is the fact that their creations will be on exhibition at the Chessmen Museum for almost a whole year. For some it´s even longer, since the museum tends to include the winning designs in its collection.

Winners

Ridder Dijkshoorn starts the ceremony by announcing the sixth-place winner. Daniël Kaper (21 years old) has finished last with his colourful Super Mario design. He made little rings out of cardboard, on which he stuck well-known characters from the computer game. The design received 52 out of a total of 850 votes.

The fifth prize goes to Mr F.G. Mellink. This year he submitted the Aluminium Chess design. The chess pieces are sleekly designed bars of aluminium, half of which are painted black. For the game board Mellink used aluminium as well, for the white squares. The public voted 72 times for this chess game.

Mr Jan de Visser takes fourth place with his design called Andalusia. The wooden chess pieces are so sleekly varnished that they look like they are made of stone.  In his design, Mr De Visser incorporated the Moorish influences that can be found all over the southern Spanish region. Nice details are the white crowns on the black king and queen and vice versa. This design received 93 votes.

Last year´s winner, Ivanka Kovacs (21), is also participating again this year. She imposed some additional restrictions on herself, as Dijkshoorn phrased it nicely, by handing in her design late in the year. This year it is a highly detailed fantasy creation, with bright little water elves competing against forest elves. Despite the limited time that the public had left to show their preference for this design, it still received 161 votes. This earned Ivanka third prize!

By now, the tension in the room is almost palpable, with only two designs to go. Throughout the year, these chess sets have been in a neck-and-neck race for a long time. In the end, Kiki van der Heiden and her inventive USB Chess take second place with 189 votes. She sculpted ornate pieces of clay around USB sticks, of which the ports are incorporated in the chessboard.

This year, first prize goes to Yanna Pelser´s Puzzle design. With 283 out of 850 votes she is the legitimate winner. Her design is made out of nothing but puzzle pieces, which she has creatively fit together. For her design, Pelser first put together a great jigsaw puzzle, on which she then painted the surface of the chessboard in black and white squares. A lot of thought has also gone into the shape of the chess pieces. Both the king and queen have a crown on their ‘heads’, but the lady is a lot more slender than the gentleman.

Pelser had to use some glue here and there to keep the pieces together, as was the case of the knight. This chess piece got its shape after Pelser was holding a little fan of puzzle pieces in her hands. In it, she saw the beautiful svelte neck of a horse and so the knight was born.

All in all, this creation cost her many hours of work, but that does not stop Pelser from making a start on her design for 2017. It will involve dark volcanic sand versus light beach sand. And for those who would also like to have a Puzzle chess game: Pelser is working on it. She is thinking about a manageable design that allows the player to assemble the chess game as though it were a construction package.

By Marjolein Overmeer