Martian Chess set - pieces, board, box

Self-Storing Martian Chess Set.

This is my version of a Martian Chess board. It all fits on a MINI+ 180mm build plate with a 0.4mm nozzle. The set is self-storing, with enough pieces for a four-player game fitting inside the box, magnets converting the board itself into storage covers. (The board is for the two-player version - use a checkerboard for four-player version.)

Martian Chess was invented by Looney Labs(TM), but they use a regular checker board and boring generic pyramid pieces, compatible with many of their other games. (Looney Labs is a trademark of Looney Laboratories, Inc. "Martian Chess" seems unprotected.)

The .blend file has bunches of bits in it, but the five main STLs are BoardFinal, BoxFinal, Pawn, Drone, and Queen. Those are the ones marked visible.

I suggest working with the .3mf files, as they are already set up with somewhat complex color changes and even infill changes. Getting right the shapes and strengths of the pieces (so they don't break if you drop them) was a bit challenging, as you can see. I tried ironing the board and it came out far worse, but you should feel free to try it yourself if you like - sinking the board into the plate and chopping off most of it using negative volumes will help if you want to experiment. You also might want to re-slice the pieces with the new Arachne slicer and maybe get a better result.

To play the base game, you need six each of Drone, Pawn, and Queen. A four-player game, played on a normal chess/checker board, would have twice as many pieces. I include gcode for seven of each piece, allowing for a lost or broken piece. (Kids, amiright?) The first timestamp in the gcode name is when the filament switch happens. (It's programmed for a manual filament switch.) Print it twice if you want
four-player games.

For the board itself, print two BoardFinal's and one BoxFinal. See the BoardFinal.png for filament colors and change times. The box is all one color. You'll need some magnets too, glued in place: 8 times 10mmX3mm magnets for the box, 8 more for the bottom of the board, and four 6mmX3mm magnets to clip the canal together. Take care getting the polarity right (sigh). The "MagnetHolder" will help figuring out the polarities - use it to hold the magnets while marking one side. https://www.reddit.com/r/functionalprint/comments/wd2vqc/tool_for_marking_ns_on_magnets_explained_in/

It is entirely possible you'd need to re-slice the .3mf files with appropriate settings for whichever filaments you want to use. In hindsight, using silk metalic PLA for the small pieces was a bad idea; it seems much more fragile and shows lines much more vividly. You should adjust the filament temperatures to match whatever filament you're using. If you do use silk filament, you'll have to experiment with the temperature and be aware the first couple of layers might look like crap but then get covered up OK.

Also included are rules (pdf), rewritten by YT, describing how the game is played.

If you don't like my pieces, consider these fine alien-themed sets I found while considering how to make the pieces, with which I am totally unassociated and from which I took no files, but I just thought they 
were cool:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1575432

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:535326

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:361112

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4293603
(Egg, FaceHugger, and Alien head?)

For what it's worth, Martian Chess is quite a fun game. It's a rather different strategy from European or Chinese chess, as you can only attack across the canal and you lose the piece once you do; you cannot protect your own pieces.

Enjoy!  And please let me know if you print and enjoy this!