Kevin Pacey wrote on Wed, May 3, 2017 10:43 PM UTC:
My latest take on why the dragon piece looks like it does is because in the Musketeer Chess variant, an amazon (the common name for the queen plus knight powers compound piece) is called a dragon, and the dragon piece figurine thus is tall like a queen, while having the face-mask used by knights in real life (much as you alluded to originally in describing the piece figurine yourself, Fergus).
As for the spider piece, I looked just now at the movement pattern of this piece type just within 1/4 (90 degrees) of all its legal moves in mid-board on an empty board, and noticed there are 6 legal moves possible within such a quadrant of all of its possible moves, and 6 is the number of prongs given to the figurine for this piece... a real stretch of the imagination I'll admit. This sort of speculation doesn't work similarly for other piece figurines though, such as the Fortress.
My latest take on why the dragon piece looks like it does is because in the Musketeer Chess variant, an amazon (the common name for the queen plus knight powers compound piece) is called a dragon, and the dragon piece figurine thus is tall like a queen, while having the face-mask used by knights in real life (much as you alluded to originally in describing the piece figurine yourself, Fergus).
As for the spider piece, I looked just now at the movement pattern of this piece type just within 1/4 (90 degrees) of all its legal moves in mid-board on an empty board, and noticed there are 6 legal moves possible within such a quadrant of all of its possible moves, and 6 is the number of prongs given to the figurine for this piece... a real stretch of the imagination I'll admit. This sort of speculation doesn't work similarly for other piece figurines though, such as the Fortress.