I kept running into the same problem: I’d be in the middle of a correspondence chess game with a friend, and the board sitting out on the table was always in the way. So I figured I’d make a magnetic board I could hang on the wall. I ended up making three different designs, and each one has magnetic spots to park the captured pieces.

As it turns out, the chess.com mobile app is a lot easier and more practical for correspondence games, so these boards now just hang on the wall as decoration.

I think a chess game can be a work of art in its own right, so each board shows a position that means something.

The honeycomb board shows a position I set up long ago for reasons I’ve forgotten. White is about to play Nc7+, forking the king and rook, and the c6 pawn can’t help because the bishop on b5 pins it.

The second board shows the Queen’s Gambit, one of the oldest and most studied openings, where White offers a pawn to fight for the center.

The third shows Bobby Fischer’s “Game of the Century” against Donald Byrne (New York, 1956), played when Fischer was 13. It’s set at move 17, where Fischer ignored the threat to his queen and played Be6, sacrificing it to launch a winning attack.