Project Overview
Imagine putting together two amazing things: Lil Nouns and Chess!
We have developed the idea for a Nouns themed wooden chess board that will be carefully crafted in high-quality wood.
Think about it as a first version of something that can be much bigger in the future, if this project is well received by the community we can create more boards in the future, and even think about donating boards to chess clubs and schools to spread the Nouns culture among chess players.
Let alone the fact that one Nouns collector will have the possibility of bringing this awesome Nouns themed chess board to their home.
Here are the images and details of how the final product will look like:
In true Mafriends fashion this will be a carefully crafted project with a lot of care for details.
The idea is to include the iconic Nouns glasses on all chess pieces and differentiate them with unique “hair styles”.
The game will include a box in solid wood (made with Masaranduba and Tamarind woods), with the internal part of the lid being used as the board. The lid can be rotated and fits on the box, or it can be removed and used above a table. All the chess pieces will fit the internal part of the box.
The box will include Nouns glasses logo laser engraved on it.
Dimensions:
Box: 36 x 36 x 7 cm
Chess pieces:
King: 2.5 x 2.5 x 9 cm
Queen: 2.5 x 2.5 x 10 cm
Bishop: 2.5 x 2.5 x 8 cm
Knight: 2.5 x 2.5 x 7 cm
Rook: 2.5 x 2.5 x 7 cm
We submitted the Chess Nouns project #1 to Nouns prophouse (round 5, prop 494), with a different set of woods, our idea is to have a set of unique Boards, receiving this grant will make it possible to produce the 2 boards together and accelerate some of the woodcrafting processes.
Since this will be an unique Chess Board we’ll mint an NFT ERC-721 of it when the irl physical board is ready and auction it to the world starting at 1 eth reserve price, the winner of the NFT auction will receive the Chess Board with free shipping and own a piece of Lil Nouns history.
50% of the proceeds of the auction (after eth gas fees and shipping costs) will be sent back to Lil Nouns treasury as a way to say thanks and to contribute for financing other cool projects. 
We’re curious to hear the opinions of the Nouns community about it, feel free to comment here or reach out on Twitter or Discord (Mafriends#1731)!
Budget
1.8 ETH + 1 Lil Noun
Address: mafriends.eth (0xbc0c08bc6c8e949d54db31eddc8ee809ef323ec3)
Why
There are more than 600 millions chess players all around the world, integrating Nouns with the most amazing board game in existence is nounish and can help the nouns culture to expand to new people.
Artisan work is also much more special than industrialized one, when you touch the wood it’s almost like it is alive, we want to make special things.
Current Progress and Timeframe
The 3D models and ideas are now ready (we’ve been working on it for 1-2 weeks), we now need to put the many man-hours on working on the wood to make the chess board a reality.
We expect each Chess Board to take 8 to 10 weeks to be finished.
If we produce the Chess Board #2 together with the #1 we expect to have it finished earlier, so both would be ready in 12 to 15 weeks (with #1 coming first, naturally).
We will share pictures and video of the backstage on twitter, while we build it.
High-Level Plan
The wooden chess board is an Artisan’s work that usually takes 8 to 10 weeks to be finished. Chess Nouns #1 was first proposed on Nouns Prop house.
Each board will be an unique collectors piece, numbered and with the year included on it.
We have several different styles of high-quality wood available for the game sets in future editions.
We expect to have a limited number of Artisan Nouns Chess Boards created each year, mainly because of how hard it is to produce it with the structure we have in place now.
This is also our first wooden nounish product, we plan to make many others.
We also want to be part of the community and undestand how we can make the world more nounish, that’s why we asked for a Lil Noun on this grant.
Team
The Chess Nouns Board will be created by Peltogyne, that is part of the Mafriends collective.
He’s been working professionally with wood crafting for the past 5 years producing decoration products such as lamps, cutting boards and small furniture.
He always try to use reused wood, which is discarded from bigger productions, but perfect to create smaller sized items, to give the wood a new meaning and not let it go to waste.
Mafriends is an art collective active since December 2020 producing original work on the NFT space as well as derivatives and commissions for other projects.
We are passionate about the digital world and also like to think about possibilities to bridge the digital and physical realms.
Usefull Links
Nouns Chess #1 thread with images (Made with Purple Heart and Jatoba)
*Due to new users limitation we can only embed 1 picture per post, but I have 5 pictures of the chess board, will share more soon.
