Introducing the K4 chess set

A new minimal

We’re excited to introduce the K4 minimalist chess set consisting of board and pieces.The goal was to create a compact design that achieves more with less, without compromising the playing experience.The game is designed and produced from sustainable materials in Germany, using a combination of high-precision CNC milling and handcraft.

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Pieces

Play with me

The pieces are the result of a decade long process, looking to express the functional and metaphorical richness of the chess pieces and their relationships using a highly constrained design language.The result are a set of elegant, yet playful pieces that raise the bar in the arena of minimalist chess piece design. They are produced from American maple and European walnut using CNC milling techniques and manual post-processing to ensure sub-millimeter precision.Base size: 28 x 28 mm // 1.1 x 1.1"
Height: 24.5 - 63 mm // 1-2.5''

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Board

stripped bare

The K4 board sports a tasteful yet modern grid pattern. Its innovate design breaks with the need for moving parts or additional boxes to store the pieces, providing two slits on the side into which all the pieces fit exactly.The black core is made of Swiss CDF, a durable and eco-friendly material, while the squares are made of thick American walnut and European maple veneer and give every board a unique look.Every board is handcrafted in Germany.Square size: 5.25 cm // 2''
Dimension: 49.7 x 42.7 x 1.4 cm // 19.5 x 16.8 x 0.5''
Weight: 3 kg // 6.6lb

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The story

A simple idea

The K4 chess set is developed by Dr. Paul Boës out of Berlin, Germany. In 2010 he set out to design a chess game with pieces that fit into another, originally with the goal of creating a travel chess with a better packaging-to-size-ratio.Experimenting with different piece and board designs as well as materials over countless hours, the K4 set emerged as the result of focussing on the core principles of timelessness, playability and minimalism.Where does the name come from?
K4 alludes to the "Vierergruppe" or Klein group, commonly denoted as K₄, which is the symmetry group of the chess board under Euclidean transformations. There are three kinds of rotation and reflection that leave a chess board unchanged: Flipping the board along each of the main diagonals and rotating it by 180 degrees. Interestingly, if we follow the squares (a1-h8) through these operations, we find that a) performing each of these operations twice brings us back to the original and b) performing any distinct two of them in sequence is equivalent to applying the third. All of this structure is elegantly captured in the Klein group.Curiously, Felix Klein, the German mathematician after whom the group is named, was also a teacher of Emanuel Lasker, the longest reigning chess world champion in history, when Lasker visited Göttingen, a stronghold of mathematical research in the 19th and 20th century.

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