Here is my progress on the chess scene, I think its looking good.
By the way I found a really quick way of getting your object to its place on the board, so given that you have your objects origins at base this is quick. So what I did was select my chess board and then go into edit mode and select the face of square I needed, then proceed to press shift-S and cursor to selected. This places the cursor right in the middle and on top the face, you then shift-S again and select object to cursor and boom object is centered and flush with the board. hope this helped