Ex-soldier's chess sets: Twin Tower rooks, putting Taliban in checkmate

Chess was originally brought to Europe via Spain from the Arab world. Now, a Canadian veteran is sending Chess sets back to the Middle East – with kings modeled after President Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden.

Jeff Train, who had been in the Canadian military until 1989, was working as a military contractor in Afghanistan when he noticed soldiers buying chess sets from local vendors. Train said he was concerned those vendors, in transporting their wares from Pakistan, were actually aiding the enemy.

“They have to drive through Taliban country and they have to pay the toll,” Train said. “So basically the soldiers were funding the insurgency.”

Train, 48, who lives in the Philippines, said he wanted to develop an alternative product for soldiers, one that would document the history they have lived. In 2009, he began making and selling sets of Canadian and American soldiers that played opposite Taliban chessmen under the company name Hobby Leisure Manufacturing . Then he began getting requests from soldiers from other countries and now manufactures British, Finnish, Norwegian, German and Australian soldiers as well. He also makes a set of Iraqi soldiers that fight Americans.

As Americans anticipate Obama’s impending announcement of troop withdrawals, Train is thinking ahead to how the soldiers will remember and represent their experiences in the Middle East. He said he wants them to be able to use the game to demonstrate actual events of the past decade.

“When a soldier gets older, he can sit down with his kids and his wife, who really don’t understand what’s going on, use the board and say, ‘The world went to war against this guy and these people,’ ” Train said.

And Train is serious about telling the story accurately. The board includes a map of either the Afghan or Iraqi stage.

The details on each resin-sculpted, hand-painted piece are specific, down to the colors used on the handles of weapons to denote whether they are made of wood or plastic depending on the nationality. The cuts of the helmets and the camouflage patterns on the uniforms are copied exactly. The hats on each Taliban piece are specifically selected and the Iraqi pieces are dressed in a combination of street clothes uniforms that had originally been issued to members of the Iraqi police force by the U.S., representing defectors. The Taliban queen, standing beside the king, Osama bin Laden, wears a sky blue burqa.

Midnight Shoveler: Independence Day Sights

I actually think that the coolest thing I saw all day was this chess game. There was a life-size chess game set up in one of the parks in town, with some cute kids playing with chess pieces the size of their whole bodies. But next to that were two rows of tables set up and a line of people waiting to sit down. On the tables were rows of chessboards. Chess is huge in Iceland, it's practically their national sport! So, you could wait for a turn and play chess here. But the catcher is that you could play against a young chess champion, and he was playing all the games at once- one guy playing 12 games sinultaneously!! It was really fascinating to watch, people of all ages joining in and having a good smarty-pants time, and the star of the show was super relaxed and casual about it.

Chess pieces

The Immortal Game, Or How 32 Carved Pieces On a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science, and the Human Brain

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A treatise on the game of chess, containing an introduction to the game, and an analysis of the various openings of games, with several new modes of attack and defence; to which are added, twenty-five new chess problems on diagrams