This Super Mario chess set is a little strange. The first thing I noticed was King Bowser and his Queen Koopa. Really? Queen Koopa? I thought he was a guy. What the hell is going on with those two? Maybe I missed something, or else I was busy playing games where people die horribly with gunfire. Wait, they have Luigi as Mario’s queen too…

Anyhow, you can’t call yourself a Super Mario fan unless you are playing chess with this collector’s edition chess set from USAopoly. You just might need some therapy after. The chess set includes 32 hand-painted figures from the game series including Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Yoshi, Toad, 1-up mushroom, Bowser, Bowser Jr., Birdo, Goomba, Hammer Bros., and Magikoopa.

This just may be the most awesome and nerdiest chess set ever. You’re looking at Paul Fryer’s Vacuum Tube Chess set. It’s one of only seven made. The pieces actually light up when they’re plugged in to the board.

How cool is that? The only thing that sucks is that you would need to replace blown tubes from time to time, but we don’t care. We just wanna play chess with Vacuum tubes that really light up.

Straight Up Chess is an interesting new version of the standard chess board. The chess set comes framed in your choice of several different wood options and you hang it on your wall. The pieces are supported by shelves that move with the pieces. So, instead of sitting across from each other for hours on end, you can just “move a piece whenever you walk by”. It even includes a marker to remind you who made the last move. Pretty cool idea.

This concept by Dutch designers looks like a Star Trek shuttlecraft on wheels. The basic idea is that the cabin on top of the platform can move around during a crash, which would hopefully keep the passengers inside safely out of any areas that would crumple and get hit during the impact.

The passengers could theoretically be exposed to much less force and the car wouldn’t get damaged quite as badly. That cuts down on injuries and death of course. It’s an awesome idea if it works the way they think it does. Probably the weakest area would be where the cabin and the platform meet. If they can make that super durable, it’s a concept that should work.