By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — For more than a century, most games of chess have been played using a familiar set of abstracted black-and-white pieces, with minimal variation in size and detail. Known as the Staunton pattern, the design was named after Howard Staunton, a British player famous during the mid-19th century when the style was first created by Nathaniel Cooke. But the Staunton pattern’s prevalence today in "The Queen's Gambit" era belies the variety of the game’s physical incarnations throughout history—in the...