I had already decided to do the chessboard squares in wood, so I played around with generated textures on the pieces instead. White marble with a Wave Texture, MixRGB (Color Dodge), and Brightness/Contrast node, and black marble with a similar setup but an Invert node thrown in and some of the values adjusted. Rendered in Cycles.
I elected to go high poly on my chess set and learned a lot getting that slot cut out without artifacting on my bishop piece. On to the final pieces!