We stock a huge selection of Staunton pieces in sizes from two inches up to almost five inches and from a variety of wood types. We sell the traditional woods guide page.
We have combined all of our Staunton pieces with traditional chess boards in a variety of sizes, styles and wood types. We carefully choose which board best compliments the pieces so that you know you will be getting a set that is perfectly matched in size and looks. You can learn more about how we choose the sizes in our chess set size guide.
In his Google Review a customer called JK gives his views on our French Knight Black Mahogany Chess Set. This set is extremely popular and has sold hundreds of units over the last decade.
Since 2008, The Regency Chess Company has been stocking a huge range of chess sets and Staunton makes up the bulk of our selection. This iconic design has morphed itself into thousands of variations with many slight and subtle design changes. The overall premise of the design however remains the same. A horses head for the knight, a castle turret for the Rook, a cross on the kings crown and round balls on the top of the pawns. All iconic signatures of this incredible design. Learn more about the anatomy of the Staunton Chessmen.
This story goes back to the Victorian era when an English based Games Company, Jacques of London, came up with a brand-new design of chess piece. They based the design of classic London architecture but also wanted to make the design compliant with mass production. They created what many believe was a design classic and got the fundamentals right on the first go. A prominent figure in the world of Chess, Howard Staunton, saw the set and immediately fell in love with it. He could see that if this set became the global standard, it would level the playing field and mean that chess players could focus entirely on the game without any confusion as to which piece was which.
Howard Staunton put his name to the set, and it immediately became a hit. Within a short period of time, it was the global standard and today it's the only design used in chess tournaments and in serious chess games.
Throughout history there have been very few instances where someone designs something and gets it right on the first go. What normally happens is that the design evolves over time and eventually becomes refined to perfection. We believe that in this case, the design was perfect from the outset and nothing was needed to improve it. Learn more about why we think the Staunton Chess set was a design classic.
This is a very common assumption. The short answer is no, there never was or has been a company called Staunton who manufactured chess sets. The word Staunton comes from Howard Staunton who was the world's top chess player in the mid 1800s. When he saw the new design, he immediately fell in love with it and endorsed it immediately. So, the sets became known as 'Staunton Chess Sets'.
The only way to buy a truly genuine Staunton chess set would be to buy a set from the 1800s. In more recent times the original business that created and marketed the set have stopped making them, instead they import sets from other manufacturers. It might surprise you to learn that the original company who made them in the 1800s, Jaques of London, still exist today but have become an importer of cheap Chinese toys instead of a manufacturer of fine chess sets.
Today the Staunton designed chessmen are made by a variety of companies and hundreds of variations of the design have been created, in some cases to make them more decorative and fancier. We sell a vast range of these fine chessmen including precise reproductions of the original Victorian sets and some more modern versions of the design.
Howard Staunton was a world-famous chess champion who was active around the mid 1800s. He was a multi-talented man whose life wasn't conventional. He wrote a handful of books, became an educationalist with very progressive and modern ideas about learning behaviours. It's said that he married a woman who already had eight children and that in his early years he was mostly inactive while he squandered his family's inheritance. Either way he's become one of the world's most famous chess players and one of the Victorian era's significant people. You can learn more about Howard and the incredible story of the chessmen in this video:
No, the term only refers to the chess pieces and not boards. Howard Staunton never endorsed a specific chess board. It is generally accepted however that a traditional mahogany or walnut board complements with the Staunton pieces best and we would always recommend a traditional, non-decorative board to go with your Staunton pieces.
