Making your own chess board

I started teaching Noah how to play chess. Not for the usual parental reasons. I'm actually not that great a player myself. I just noticed he has started to take an interest in games like candy land and pieces that move, and chess is really cool because it has a bunch of pieces that move in different ways etc etc.
But I didn't have a board. So first I made one out of paper, but I had forgotten the dimensions of a chess board. This was last night and we were done with computers for the day. Either that or Noah was using it for PBS kids or whatever. And I can't believe this but I forgot that the board was a square, so I made an 8 x 12 board and the pieces were made from folded pieces of paper with the figures drawn on it roughly. The night was just horse in Chinese, because why create a pictograph when one has been around for so long.
Well today I made a real board with Chinese ink on a box (instead of crayon on paper) the box being nice because it can hold the pieces. Also I started making the base out of wet molded paper for some fancier chess pieces. But I noticed today, while playing with Noah, that I really like my little rough pieces, more than I would like a cheap chess set mainly because I made them. The molding of bases took much longer than I thought it would, but even that wasn't a waste of time because Jonah had fun playing with the wet paper in water. It was a very stimulating and sensory activity.
Tonight when I let Noah win he didn't like it though. He wanted a game where we could both win. For instance even when he wins at Candy Land, he can then come and bring me into the Castle. So we both win. In Chess there is clearly a loser. I mean, one guy dies basically or surrenders or is captured. I noticed that I just used the Chinese "eat" instead of captured though when playing with Noah.
I was thinking I'd make another board where the two of us can travel through a world of other bad guys and obstacles, like a video game, and I could just make a few pieces of paper that I pick up and reuse as we continue to move along. And that way, he will learn how the different pieces move, but we will both be able to win. Kind of like a two player version of Mario Bros.  (wait they didn't have the two characters on the same screen did they? But you know what I mean.) Well that instead of say a Street Fighter where one guy is defeated and twitching on the ground. Which is what chess really is.