Want to do your own life-size chess match?

Here's how we did it. You're welcome to steal any and all ideas. The 'price' will be to send your story to rockfordchess@comcast.net so we can share it with others.

The board

As luck would have it, our local community theater (The fabulous Starlight Theater) was doing a production of "Chess" the musical and had a giant chess board painted on stage. They were kind enough to allow us to stage the chess match on the stage prior to one of the shows. It was great and provided great seating for all the relatives and patrons.

One of the local schools decided to paint a chess board on their playground and have chess hats ready so they can play live chess matches anytime.

The squares are roughly 3x3 foot. Plan on including algebraic notation on every square so kids know where they are standing.

The players

The children all came from local chess clubs. Our chess community is always looking for ways to get the clubs together for events and this fit right in. We limited it to tournament players so we would have experienced children who knew algebraic notation.

There are two adult on-stage parts played by two chess coaches. The script was read by three off-stage actors (from the theater). This worked out well as the on-stage players didn't have to memorize and delivery lines.

The costumes

The children were asked to wear either a blue or white shirt, then bring the opposite color in the car. At show time, we divided the kids by color, then asked a few to switch shirts to even things out.

The hats were made for about $1 a piece.

• Pawn hats
  1. Bought foam visors at craft store for 80 cents a piece.
  2. Printed off a 4-inch pawn
  3. Glued it to the hat.
      
• Piece hats
  1. Bought 18 inch by 24 inch foam rectangles at craft store for about $1 each
  2. Bought 16 feet of .5 wide elastic
  3. Print off one large picture of pieces for front
  4. Printed off two smaller pictures for sides
  5. Wrapped rectangle width-wise around head. Joined edges with strips of elastic stapled to edges
  6. Glued big piece picture on front
  7. Glued smaller piece pictures on side
  8. Cut excess foam rectangle for tapered look

For close-up pictures of the hats, click here.

The script

We wrote a really corny script. Do not fret over a great script. No one came expecting to see a great script anyway. It was just something to hold the show together.

The script  went through several revisions with the intent to simplify staging and production. For instance, we cut out all special lighting changes, cut out curtain closing and opening, decided not to have on-stage microphones (all off-stage dialog), kept props to a minimum. This worked out very well and we would highly recommend simplifying production as much as possible.

We also cut down on prelude and epilog so the kids (the true stars) would be on stage a longer percentage of the time.

You're welcome to use our script at http://www.rockfordchess.org/rvc/starlight/ if you like. Send us your revised script and we'll post it for others.

The rehearsal

We had one rehearsal. For the kids, it was simply walking them around, telling them what was going to happen. We had an official 'kid corraller' who would be on-stage prompting the kids if they got stuck.

The adults ran through the reading making some minor changes.

Your experience...

We would be very interested in your Life-size chess match. Send pictures and details to RockfordChess@comcast.net .