Printworks Lacquered Athena Chess Set Review: A Coffee Table Board First

13.8 inches square. 4.4 pounds. Those two numbers describe the Printworks Lacquered Athena better than any marketing copy, because they tell you it's a coffee table object with 64 squares on it. My verdict up front: buy it to look at, skip it as the set you actually play on. I've spent decades around club sets, and a spec sheet like this one is not hard to read.

The pitch is honest about what it is, at least in the photos. A glossy multi-color board with wooden pieces, sized to sit on a console and draw comments from guests. Nothing wrong with that. A 13.8 inch board is furniture scale, not tournament scale, and PrintWorks clearly knows which market it's selling into.

What it is and who it's for

The listing gives you a 13.8 by 13.8 inch board, 4.4 lb total weight, a lacquered MDF playing surface, and grass tree wood pieces in a multi-color finish. Instructions come in English, French and German, which tells you PrintWorks expects this to sell in Europe as well as the States. What the listing does not give you: king height, piece base diameter, a piece count, or any mention of a storage box.

Who it's for? People furnishing a room. Someone who wants a chess set on the table the way other people keep a bowl of lemons there. It's also a reasonable gift for a person who likes games but doesn't own a proper set yet. If you want furniture-grade chess with a stated king height and a real piece weight, the sets in my guide to best luxury chess sets sit on a diffrent shelf entirely.

What the specs actually tell you

Divide 13.8 by eight and you get roughly 1.7 inches per square. US Chess guidance puts tournament squares at 2 to 2.5 inches, so this board is meaningfully tighter than a competition set. The practical effect: pieces that look crowded and knock into each other when two adults play a real game across from one another.

King base should run about 75 to 80 percent of a square, which caps it near 1.3 inches here. No king height is listed, so I can't tell you the piece-to-board proportion, and that's the first number I check on any set. Its absence is a small red flag. For playing sets that publish their king heights, see best Staunton chess sets.

4.4 lb is light. Light enough that a bumped elbow sends the whole board sliding across a table, and light enough to carry from room to room in one hand, which is presumably what the "portable" line in the feature list is getting at.

MDF under a lacquer coat is stable material. It won't warp or split the way solid wood can when the heat comes on in October. But MDF has no grain to hide a knock, and a chip on a lacquered edge stays visible.

What owners report

Here's the awkward part, and I'd rather say it than paper over it. When I pulled the listing, it carried no star rating and no review count. Null. So I can't summarize an owner chorus that doesn't exist, and I'm not going to invent quotes to fill the space.

What I can tell you is how boards like this behave, because lacquered MDF displays have a predictable life. High gloss shows dust and fingerprints within a day, and window light picks up every smudge. People who own gloss boards end up wiping them weekly. The most common complaint I see on decor-first boards across this category is size: buyers study a staged photo with a sofa behind it and then measure their new board at 13.8 inches and feel shortchanged.

The other recurring theme is wear at the edges, where hands rest and pieces get set down hard. If you want a board that shrugs off that treatment, solid wood lasts longer, and my roundup of best wooden chess sets covers the ones worth paying for.

Pros and cons

Pros:

• 13.8 inch footprint fits a console table or a small apartment coffee table, so you don't need a dedicated gaming room.
• Lacquered MDF stays flat through dry winters and humid summers.
• 4.4 lb total means one hand carries it to the porch or the next room.
• Instructions in three languages, which matters if the gift is going overseas.
• The multi-color finish is the whole point, and it's not something you find on a $30 folding board.

Cons:

• Squares work out to about 1.7 inches, under the 2 to 2.5 inch range US Chess suggests.
• No king height or piece base diameter listed, so you're buying proportions blind.
• Gloss lacquer over MDF chips at the edges and holds every fingerprint.
• No storage box, bag, or piece count mentioned in the listing.
• Zero owner reviews to lean on at the time I checked.

Specs at a glance

Alternatives worth a look

I was handed one product listing for this piece, so there are no comparison ASINs here, and I won't fabricate any to fill the section. What I'll do instead is point you at the right shelf.

If your real goal is a set that plays as well as it looks, start with the wider chess sets category and work upward from square size. If the Printworks look is what grabbed you and you have a bigger table, a 20 inch wooden board gives you the same visual weight with squares an adult can actually use. And if you're shopping for a player who keeps score, skip decor entirely.

Should you buy it

Buy it if you want a good-looking object on a table and you'll play maybe a dozen casual games a year on it. At 13.8 inches it fits where a 20 inch board won't, and the lacquered finish does decorative work that a vinyl roll-up can't touch.

Skip it if what you actually want is a chess set. Serious games need 2 inch squares and pieces with a published king height, and this listing gives you neither. If a clock or a scoresheet is going to be involved, go read best tournament chess sets and buy from that list instead.