grondilu wrote:
I find it interesting that this simple question is one of these questions about chess that is impossible to answer.
But... you answered it. In the title even.
How many pieces does a chess set need? No more than ... 96!
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Some time ago It occurred to me than it's not clear how many pieces a chess set needs.
Typical chess sets have one extra queen of each color in case a promotion happened and two queens of the same color need to be on the board at the same time.
But what about three queens? What about underpromotions?
These situations are extremely rare in a typical game, but from a purely hypothetical point of view, there is no obvious reason all pawns could not be promoted to any of the allowed promotion pieces : queen, bishop, knight and rook.
Thus the absolute maximal number of pieces needed for a chess set is 32 + 2*8*4 = 96. The exact number needed is probably lower than that, but we don't know it as it depends of what the possible chess games are, and we don''t know them exhaustively (such knowledge is likely physically impossible to acquire anyway).
Of course in practice we can do with only 34 pieces, but still I find it interesting that this simple question is one of these questions about chess that is impossible to answer.