About Le Royaume des Échiquiers

What you will find here

The site is organised in three parts. The woods: the species used for pieces and boards, their differences and their regulation. Patterns and styles: the Staunton, the historical styles, the Lewis chessmen. Making and use: sizes, weighting, manufacturing processes, the Jura tradition, mineral materials and care.

This site does not deal with choosing a set in general or with the rules of the game: it concentrates on the object itself.

How the information is checked

• The standards cited come from the official FIDE texts, in particular the chapter on equipment without electronic components in force since 1 March 2026.
• The data on wood species draw on the CITES appendices, the IUCN Red List and technical wood databases.
• Historical facts (dates, places, numbers of objects) are cross-checked against museum notices, encyclopaedias and heritage inventories.
• When a piece of information rests only on a commercial source, we say so; when it could not be confirmed, we remove it.

No customer review, no quotation and no price is invented. Physical values (densities, hardness) are indicative averages: a given piece of wood or stone may differ from them.

Links to commercial sites

Some pages link to collections at Le Palais des Échecs, a specialist shop, to illustrate a point with concrete examples (a wood, a pattern, an accessory). These links are neither a ranking nor a price comparison. The site links to no other shop and has no connection with the makers cited, such as Chavet or Jaques of London.

Corrections

Standards evolve, museums revise their notices, regulations change. The pages carry the date of their last update in their structured data, and are reviewed when the reference sources are modified.