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Fairy chess

#2
There is NOT only western chess pieces used in the world.

In East Asia, tradition pieces are flat with their name (or abbreviation) written on it (usually in Chinese character). Also some has piece image drawn/printed on the flat surface in recent years too.

Your question is no problem here at all.
#3
By the way, it looks quite strange that western chess players insist to use those 3-D pieces. 3D piece is very expensive, very difficult to identify (even GM always misidentify piece from time to time), undurable, not be able to play real "random" flip-up, take up much volume to store and carry, unstable to stand, difficult to replace if one of them get lost, waste materials......
#4
You can buy some musketeer chess pieces on ebay www.ebay.com/str/thechessshopofnorthcarolina
But nowadays you can 3D print pieces as well.
www.chessvariants.com/craft/a-catalog-of-3d-printable-chess-variant-pieces
github.com/Krokotyl/printable-3D-Orda-Chess-Set

But as Cheshire_the_Maomao said, you can always create piece sets using a flat base and stickers, something like this
preview.redd.it/homemade-chak-set-v0-5skw8w1oxo6a1.jpg?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=790c6dd5713b6912fd0c81550b3fc9453e249564
or this
www.sasktoday.ca/central/opinion/the-meeple-guild-a-fresh-take-of-birth-of-chess-5477919
#6
@gbtami said in #5:
> @Cheshire_the_Maomao you say 3D pieces are "very difficult to identify". I think this is quite the opposite!
> To understand why, I suggest to read the Recognizability part of www.pychess.org/blogs/Internationalized_Pieces

Hello, glad to see you here!

I say "3D pieces are "very difficult to identify"", by a more wider meaning to it. I believe no one will mistake a rook for a queen, none will someone mistake 车 for 象, when they are reading rule book. In this meaning they are equal.

But, by the meaning of on-board play, there has been much higher frequency that a chess GM will overlook a 3-D chess piece that 2-D pieces. Just yesterday Humpy in Tata 2024 suicided her king because of overlooking a checking rook, and Vidit did so too in Tata 2021. Also there are many queen-suicide in OTB chess games.
There has been very few of such examples in 象棋, even if 象棋 games are often much faster (30+20 is "slow" and 5+3 "rapid" for 象棋) than chess.

Thus I believe the 3-D pieces hinder the player's ability to recognize the board situation more than 2-D pieces.
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I agree 汉字 is difficult for foreigners, especially those used by Japan shogi. That is because of the difficulty of language - not 2D figure. And characters are even more distinguishable (than western letters) if you are native to them.
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> They’re not distinct from each other. This is especially true for abstract pieces. In Chess, you can think “Look for the horse! Look for the tower!” But what does your brain think when looking for the abstract pieces? “Look for the thing that points in the way that I uh... like it to point” They’re all just strange shapes. For letters, they’re just letters. They all blend together. In fact, I feel like I’m reading the pieces more than recognizing the pattern.

Ill-designed 2-D image is bad. If the 2-D image is badly designed and indistinguishable itself (for example, default set of ouk chaktrang, or the westernized point-arrow representation of shogi piece), that's not the default of 2-D either. Merida 2-D chess image is good, and pychess's 2-D 象棋 piece image is good too.
#7
I think you completely misunderstand the reason why GM level chess players overlook anything in OTB chess. I'm 100% confident it is never because pieces are 3D or 2D or kanji or anything. Thinking in Chess/Xiangqi/Shogi at higher level is an inner process where they calculate the variations in their head and this is completely independent of the physical representation of the pieces. And this is exactly the same for high level Ches/Xiangqi/Shogi players.

It would be nice to have statistical comparison about top 10/100/1000 Chess/Shogi/Xiangqi players blunder rate, but I'm quite confident they would be absolutely similar.

Btw I completely agree with you that traditional Makruk/Ouk pieces (being 2D or 3D) are the worse design regarding recognizability :)