I have been noticing that on the boxes of chess sets that the board is set up incorrectly. There is usually a dark square to each players right and the queen is on the wrong color. Is it that the people responsible for creating the boxes and setting up the chess pieces have never played chess before? I went into a Brookstones store the other week and they had several chess sets set up in the store. All of them were set up incorrectly. I have seen this also in TV commericials where there are people playing chess in parks or whatever. Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me???
You’re right. picture of Toys R Us chessboard.
And I know why that is, too–it’s because they’ve got the board twisted around, set up as a diamond, for purely a visual arts thing, to suit the demands of graphics design.
To make a good picture, you want to have the white corner on the bottom, and a black piece on it, and have the pieces lined up so they point up to the right.
The chessboard looks better and is more visually appealing if it’s arranged as a diamond shape for the camera, and if the bottom point of the diamond–the corner closest to the viewer–is white, and if there’s a contrast between the white square and a black piece. If it were a black square and a black piece right in front, you’d just have this big black blob there, which wouldn’t look as good.
And the reason why you can’t have the chessboard set up as a diamond with the white square in front, but set up the pieces with Black going correctly up to the left, and White facing them across the board, is that people read from left to right, and they look at pictures from left to right, and people enjoy looking at pictures that sweep off to the right. See how with the pieces set up the way they are, it makes a kind of middle empty corridor, that leads your eye off to the right and the top of the diamond, and out of the frame? That’s what extensive marketing research somewhere has demonstrated is what Americans, at least, tend to prefer in their product packaging. You can look at a lot of packaging and see this same “left to right” bias in the artwork.
It all boils down to making a pleasing picture for the consumer, and forget about correct placement of the pieces. These things aren’t put together by chess players, they’re put together by graphics arts majors.
What about boards that fold in the middle? In every example I’ve seen, the fold divides the board between the players (i.e., it’s parallel to the lines of pieces). Were such a board set up the other way, it probably wouldn’t look right (at least, if the fold is discernable). What do they do in that case?
I’d guess that they just airbrush out the fold.