Print Free Game Boards

How to Make Playing Pieces

Arimaa: Arimaa uses a standard 8 by 8 checkers or chess board. The sole difference is that it's useful to have the four traps on the board marked (as ours do). You can use chess pieces for the animals in Arimaa. You can also opt to buy a nice quality board from game's creators at the Arimaa website.

Barca: Barca requires three different animals for each side: the elephant, lion, and mouse. You can use chess pieces to represent them. We recommend that the chess pieces reflect the animals' movement: the rook can be the mouse, the bishop is the lion, and the queen is the elephant. If you take this approach, you'll need pieces from more than one set (because each side requires two elephants). Alternatively use some other piece for the elephants, such as pawns or knights. If you like the game after trying it, we strongly recommend you buy the high-quality commercial game from the game's creators at the Barca website.

Cam, Camette, and Camelot: Use the pieces from a chess set or two. All you need are Knights and Pawns.

Checkers, Hexdame, Bashni, Lasca, Dameo, Ugolki, and Castle: Standard Checkers men work well in any of these games. For Dameo and Ugolki, you may need the pieces from two checkers sets, as they require more than a dozen men per player. You could also use coins like pennies and nickels or dimes. In Checkers and Checkers-like games, its useful to be able to distinguish the two sides of the pieces. This way you can flip them over when they are promoted to "kings".

Conspirators, Teeko, Ringo, Brandubh, Fitchneal, Chinese Checkers, and Halma: You can use the pieces from any game that supplies two colours of markers. Examples are the pieces from Checkers, Go, Gomoku, Reversi or similar "pebble" games. Or use chess pawns or small poker chips. You could also use pennies, nickels, or dimes.

Brandubh and Fitchneal have an additional requirement. You'll need a unique marker to represent the King. Just use any small token that is easily distinguish from all others. Or mark a common piece as a King.

Hex and Y: In most cases, these "connection games" require more pieces than a checkers game can provide. While you could use pennies and nickels, if possible we recommend using different-coloured pebbles from games that provide many of them, like Go or its relatives.

The Jungle Game: Of all the board games on this website, this is the only one that calls for some inventiveness when it comes to the playing pieces. We've cut out little paper squares and written upon each the name of the animal and its power number. It's not beautiful but it works.

We've also used flat-top checkers upon which we've written the animal numbers. That's functional and looks a little more attractive.

Chess pieces look best of all -- except that there are only 6 different pieces in a chess set, whereas The Jungle Game requires 8 different animals. We made up the difference with some flat-top checkers. Drop us a line if you can think of something better!

You can buy commercial versions of this game, but many provide only printed paper for the game board and flat checkers-like pieces for the animals. That's very inexpensive but also not very appealing. One company manufactured a nicer board with three-dimensional pieces, but this is no longer being produced. You might be able to find a secondhand copy online.

Martian Chess: The game is played with three different sizes of pyramid-shaped pieces. Colours are irrelevant. Thus you just need three readily-distinguishable shapes, for example, from chess pieces or coins. If you like the game after trying it, we recommend you buy the high-quality commercial game from the game's creators at Looney Labs.

Salta: While any 10 by 10 checkered board will do, it's a little more difficult to obtain the men for this game. You need 15 markers for each player, and the tricky part is that each piece must be uniquely identified. You could use the pieces from two standard checkers sets, then either write on them directly, or apply a piece of tape to each upon which you've written their identifiers.