Hey all! See below for my first attempt at a pawn.
I wanted to see if I could do the whole thing without Michael directing me, so rather than making two separate mesh objects and then joining them, I added the UV sphere directly to the pawn mesh, and then deleted the vertices making up the bottom of the sphere, inset the circular face at the top of the pawn’s neck, deleted the inset face, then brought the sphere down and merged doubles - this means that the whole inside of the pawn is one “space”, with no intersecting geometry.