Safety Note: Wear shoes when assembling this chess board. The plastic tiles look similar at a distance whether right side up or upside down. Upside down, the plastic pegs will hurt anyone stepping on them with bare feet. Be particularly mindful of nearby children.

To easily and quickly assemble this MegaChess board, you will need to take these steps as detailed below:

1. Check the tile pieces
2. Lay out the tiles
3. Clip the tiles together

1. Check the Tile Pieces

This chess board is composed of 7 different designs for the tiles or squares. All 7 are the same dimension, but they have different designs for the loops and pegs used to join the tiles together. The picture to the right shows what we mean by a peg and a loop, and how they work together to connect the chess board tiles. Basically, you will push a peg into a loop to join two tiles.
As with all pictures on this web page, you can click the magnifying glass icon wherever you see it to zoom in for a closer look.

Viewed from the top, some of your black chess board tiles will have loops on only one side. In the picture to the left, the tile on the right has loops only along its bottom side. The tile on the left side has loops on its left side and along its bottom. Hidden underneath, it also has pegs on the right side and along the bottom. We call this tile design "MB" for middle black. These tiles will be used for the black tiles in the middle of the chess board.

If you turn over the right-hand tile in the above picture, you will find two design types based on which side of the tile has a row of 6 pegs next to its only row of loops. The picture at right shows the design where you will find the row of pegs along the right-hand edge of the tile if you hold the row of loops along the bottom.

The yellow circle shows one of the pegs in that row. Across from that circle, there are no pegs along the opposite edge of that tile style. This tile style we call "E1B" for the first edge style in black. For the tiles with the pegs on the opposite edge, that is, along the left edge viewed from the back with the loops along the bottom, we call "E2B" for the second edge style in black.

We call them edge styles because they will be placed along the edge of the chess board. These edge styles are designed to produce a clean line along the edge of the chess board without any unused loops hanging out.

The white tiles follow the same designs as the pictures above. The white tiles in the middle of the chess board have a design called "MW" for middle white as shown in the picture below at right. For white tiles with pegs along the right viewed from the back with the loops along the bottom, we call the "E1W" design for the first edge tiles in white. For white tiles with pegs along the left viewed from the back with the loops along the bottom, we call the "E2W" design for the second edge tiles in white.

Unlike the black tiles, the white tiles have another design, one with no loops at all as shown in the picture at left. We call this the "CW" design because it is used as the one corner tile where we need no loops at all.

After you unpack the two boxes containing this MegaChess board, you should find a total of 64 plastic tiles. If you put them in 7 piles according to the styles described above, you should have the quantities shown at right for each style.

2. Lay Out the Tiles

With an understanding of the 7 tile styles above, lay out the tiles from your 7 piles where you have been collecting them according to the instructions above and shown by the diagram to the left. Lay them face up even though the pegs are hidden underneath.

Remember to click the diagram at left to see its bigger version where it is easier to see the loops and pegs on each tile.

3. Clip the Tiles Together

To clip the tiles together, you will need a hard surface to work on.

To begin, lay out an MW styled tile first, any one of the 25 of those styles that you have. Lay it as the bottom-right tile in the above diagram. Push the pegs down of two MB style tiles into the loops of your starting MW tile such that the MB tile's pegs, not its loops, are along the edge of the chess board. The picture below shows how these 3 tiles are positioned before being connected.

Following the same pattern, assemble all the remaining MW and MB styled tiles until you produce a chess board with 7 (not 8) tiles on each side. as shown in the picture below.

Also shown in the picture below are the remaining edge tiles and the final corner tile, ready to be assembled to the 7-square chess board. Connect the edge tiles as shown below and your MegaChess board is properly assembled and ready for play.

In no case should you have loops sticking out past the edge of the chess board. You should also never have an internal edge without loops and pegs, and therefore unable to connect to a tile as shown in the diagram at right where the white loop has no mating black peg.

Care & Maintenance

This chess board is not designed for use on soft surfaces such as sand or a grass lawn where the pegs and loops will separate during use from the footsteps of the players.

To overcome this problem, some MegaChess customers will assemble this chess board upside down and put one drop of Superglue™ into each loop with the peg in the loop as part of assembly. This will fuse the peg and loop together, reducing the chess board's tendency to separate during play. The two problems with this solution are:

1. The chess board can no longer be taken apart for storage.
2. With enough stress, such as a heavy person on soft sand, the loop or peg will break instead of separate.

To disassemble this chess board, lift tile edges with a loop straight up from the other tile edges with pegs as they were originally assembled. See the first picture in this instruction.

Do not try to pull them apart sideways nor bend them up or down to pop the pegs out of the loops as shown in the picture at right or left.

Occasionally, a peg or loop will break off as shown in the picture at right. This chess board is engineered to work fine with one or two loops and pegs missing and unable to connect, as long as the remaining loops and pegs are connected. Once a tile has only 2 working loops or pegs, it is time to be replaced. You can buy individual replacement tiles near the bottom of the chess board's product page.

For easy storage, we recommend separating this chess board first along its middle, yielding two 4 x 8 square boards. Then separate each of those in their middle, yielding a total of four boards each 4 squares across. Such 4 x 4 boards are easy to store and transport, and faster to reassemble than the process above involving 64 tiles.