Carl Hansen's Originale Skakspil is a rare Danish chess set manufactured by Carl Hansen in 1877. The pieces are made of brass, one side silver-plated, the other oxidised. The entire set has a very humorous design. The king represents King Gambrinus, a legendary hero celebrated as an icon of beer and brewing, sometimes also referred to as the patron saint of the brewers. He is appropriately depicted with a tankard of beer in his hand. The queen is a coquettish lady with her hair pinned up and a frilly dress. The bishop resembles a jockey and the knight is an imaginative mixture of a gentleman in formal attire and a large horse's head. The rook is ‘Peter Rundetårn’, a figure with a helmet and a small box under his arm, standing on a tower-shaped base. The rook is modelled on Copenhagen's Rundetårn, which was built as an astronomical observatory in the mid-17th century on behalf of the Danish King Christian IV. The pawns are simple peasants with round faces wearing caps. The set comes in a wooden box with separate compartments for the individual pieces and a sliding lid with an imprint.

The pieces are based on designs by the Danish sculptor Nicolai Hansen. They were manufactured and distributed by Carl Hansen. It is not known whether the two were related. Hansen is one of the most common names in Denmark.
Carl Hansen (1837-1894) was a manufacturer of door handles, which he made primarily from brass. He founded his company, which was based at Admiralgade 5 in Copenhagen, in 1862. At the time, he apparently had considerable competition from Germany, but he managed to hold his own against them. This apparently spurred him on to try his hand at another product: chess. Various large-format newspaper advertisements accompanying the launch of the chess set indicate that Hansen's pieces were intended as a special Christmas gift in 1877, which he offered for a price of 15 Danish Crowns. A year later, at Christmas 1878, there were again various smaller-format advertisements with the headline ‘Til Julen’ (= for Christmas). After that, the chess set is only mentioned once more, when Carl Hansen exhibited it at the Copenhagen Industrial Exhibition in 1880. This suggests that only a small number of chess sets were produced. On the inside of the lid of my set of pieces, the number ‘32’ is written in pencil. Perhaps this is Hansen's numbering of the chess sets.

Carl Hansen is also of great interest to chess collectors because he was chairman of the Copenhagen Artturners' Association (Kunstdrejerforeningen) from 10 February 1879 and, in this capacity, published a chronicle of the association in 1891 on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. The book contains some remarkable information about Copenhagen's turners, in particular about the tensions between wood turners (Trædrejere) and art turners (Kunstdrejere, formerly also known as Beendrejere).