The newest of our luxury Staunton pattern chess sets featuring a 4.4" King in red sandalwood.

This is a classic design featuring the finest aspects of any Staunton pattern chess set ever seen...a beautiful strong and powerful knight, superb size proportioning between all the pieces and exhibiting true delicate craftsmanship in all the pieces, down to the pawn.

The mane of this knight is unbelievably well carved.

The Alban- a knight that one deservedly looks up to!

The knights are truly magnificent...here we look up at them. Mouse over the pictures above and see the extent of their exuberance. We have no fear of showing you the absolute closest detail including the imperfections in our photography...the quality of the carving speaks!

Criteria often missed is in the finer details; quality of the carving of the balls on the tips of key pieces and the evenness of the crenellations of the rook:

Are the balls carved at the top of the pieces round or squat- they should be round but this is difficult to achieve. Are the cuts in the turrets (crenellations) evenly spread; a sign of a well made chess set. Are the chess pieces in the set correctly proportioned in terms of height and base diameter- check this out!

Here's a picture showing an aerial view of the chess pieces as seen on the optional 2.25" square sized chessboard. Note the proportioning of each of the pieces base diameters:

An aerial view showing the chess piece base sizes corrspond to the optional luxury chessboard with 2 1/4" squares.

Correct sizing and piece proportioning is often overlooked by chess manufacturers, with base sizes wrong and certain pieces oversized and underweighted. The Alban's king weighs 4.1 ounces and has a base diameter of 1 7/8", that's proportionately correct for a king height of 4.4".

Correct piece sizing: an important aspect of good chessset design where base diameters are correctly matched to chess piece heights.

Pictures of how the pieces look in the optional chess case that we have had designed to suit this chess set with it's additional queens coming soon!

This 34 piece set has additional queens and all chessmen have green felt slides.