Board games are getting a designer makeover. Think Fendi’s Roma Tower — a glammed-up Jenga set — and Tiffany & Co.’s luxurious backgammon set, both launched in 2025. Together, they raise a playful question: can board games be fun and look like a million bucks too? Taking a cue from these international ateliers, Young Designers India (YDI), a group of designers of Indian origin but spread across the globe, have put their stamp on the chess set. Two iterations reimagine the materiality, form and storytelling of chaturanga (predecessor of chess), crafted as collectibles, for those who enjoy the savoir faire of a well-made chess set.

YDI was started as an online community on Instagram around 2020 by Sushant Vohra, a Seattle-based industrial designer. “Our community of around 16,000 members regularly conducts design experiments. In a pilot last year, we offered designers a chance to work in a studio-style setting and get different resource people from across the world. The brief was simple: create an object through the lens of modern India,” explains Vohra. The chess project was part of YDI’s first ‘Community Project’ initiative.

Supported by Teague (a Seattle-based design consultancy) and Figma (a cloud-based collaborative design tool), the initiative was structured as a typical studio-style design project, with YDI generating over 1.2 million impressions (digital content was displayed on screens 1.2 million times). Two teams creating chess sets, titled Moh Maya and Aakaar, had a lead designer and two to three creatives each, tasked with generating ideas and handling execution. “The emphasis was not just on the final artefact, but on the dialogue, iteration, and decision-making that shaped it. In that sense, every project evolved into a live case study in collaboration, authorship, and taste,” says Vohra.

The chess sets: Moh Maya (illusion) and Aakaar (form) celebrate materiality, architectural styles and philosophies but with a modernist interpretation.

Designers: Udhbav Bharadwaj, Ritviz Sharma, Shubham Modgi, Aditya Mehra

“This chess set returns to the ideologies and materials used when chaturanga was formed. Terracotta and bronze have been central to the subcontinent, transcending hierarchy from labourer to king. The result is a design that curates rather than abandons history, finding unity in diversity through disciplined form,” explains New York-based freelance industrial designer Udhbav Bharadwaj.

Terracotta with metal accents celebrate the soil, while bronze was chosen for its corrosion-resistant nature and ability to fuse into any material seamlessly. The chessboard’s slightly raised playing surface mimics the rhythm of stepwells, while the flat borders recall the quiet restraint of stone courtyards. Each square has a sunken bronze star that catches the light. The board features 49 full stars and 28 half-stars, a subtle nod to the 28-day lunar cycle. The pieces are created with intent and architectural tension. The pawn’s spherical head is inverted to create a cavity that allows a single metal sphere to crown it upon promotion during play. The chariot has a top carved with four controlled cuts with a hollowed cavity beneath as a quiet homage to the vimanas of the Ramayana. The knight marries terracotta and bronze, with the body fashioned from a monolithic cylinder of terracotta with two bronze plates, cast using the traditional lost-wax method. The bishop (imagined as an elephant) is formed from a bronze core with a terracotta shell, poured, shaped, and aged by hand. Finally, the king is inspired by the turbans and sarpech of Mughal emperors, Punjabi maharajas, and Sikh leaders. The queen’s tiara holds a subtle cavity, mirroring, in exact form, the crown jewel set at the front of the king’s headpiece.

Designers: Tanay Vora, Vidushi Gupta, Yaman Gupta, Hardik Sharma

“For too long, Indian design has been seen through a narrow lens — nostalgic, ornamental, or folkloric. Each piece of Moh Maya feels like a tiny building — sculptural, geometric, and rooted in the spirit of Indian modernism. The movement that shaped so much of India’s mid-century architecture — raw concrete, strong lines, bold geometry — inspires the language of the set,” explains Salzburg-based industrial designer Tanay Vora.

The chessboard is tiered with the pawns beginning on a lower plane. The central battleground rises, while the back row holding the king and queen ascends. The shifts in elevation allow you to add drama to each move. The king is inspired by the steps of the temple, the tiered top is an allusion of the steep path to royalty while the queen takes its form from the iconic Jantar Mantar, the knight from B.V. Doshi’s Tagore Memorial Hall, and the pawn has a cut at the back, symbolising its ability to only move forward.

While there has been quite a buzz around the sets, “with some high-profile chess players from Tamil Nadu showing interest, the projects are currently still in the prototyping phase. We are evaluating the possibility of releasing limited editions that preserve the conceptual and material integrity of the original designs”, concludes designer Sushant Vohra.

The freelance writer is based in Chennai.