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Building a chess board out of Lego is a feat even a 5 year old could master with a little help, but creating a fully interactive game of Chess Lego’s tied together by wireless computer trickery is a completely different story.

The board was developed by a group called Team Hassenplug and features a 12.5′ by 12.5′ chessboard. The cost? $30,000 over a one year period which was used for developing the systems software and purchasing more than 100,000 Lego pieces.

Here’s a video of the game in action: (after the break)

As you’ll notice from the video, the pieces are controlled by a connection to your PC. The computer version of the game is your standard chess board with pieces displayed, as you move each piece the objects on the board move along to their chosen destination. If a piece is taken out of the game either by capture or through a pawn being Queened, those pieces move to their allotted spot just off the board, keeping the entire process hands free.

Here’s the specs for the board provided by the Team Hassenplug website:

Over 100,000 LEGO® pieces

• 37,612 in the chess board
• 17,748 in the robot bases
• 17,114 in the bodies
• 22,688 in the mosaics
• 1,853 in the move selection center

Total retail cost: around $30,000

Size of board: 156ft2 (14.5m2)

Took 4 people about a year to create

Opponent types

• Human vs Human
• Human vs Computer
• Computer vs Computer

Play options

• Normal chess game
• Chess puzzle
• Replay historical match

Programming languages used

LabVIEW for the robots

C# for the PC user interface

Interfaces with standard chess engine

I’m not a huge fan of Chess, but I can’t help be impressed with everything that went into creating the coolest version of the game I’ve ever seen made out of tiny pieces of plastic.