Pawns that transform

Does anyone know of chess sets where the pawns physically transform and change into the other pieces upon promotion? Some sets come with a few extra queens but technically you could have up to 9 queens, rooks, bishops, or knights per color.

They could probably be made. Maybe the easiest would be with flat "diagrammatic" pieces where you could fold the piece up like a book so that each diagram is on one open face of the book. You might also be able to do it with origami pieces (though that make take some time per tranformation) or cylindrical pieces where the pawns are comprised of nested tubes and to select a type of piece you pull (or telescope) up the appropriate one.

That's stupid

It's not great it's stupid

Why is it stupid? No admiration for a bit of creative thinking?

EDIT: @bquistorff: As far as I know, no such set is commercially available. You should try out a few different methods yourself!

Wow!!  You got me spinning here!!  We should never discourage "thinking outside the box"  Being creative is never ever, "stupid".  However there is something known as having a solution to a problem that does not exist.   I guess it is possible for a player to convert many pawns to Queens . However when a player gets a few Queens the game should soon be over.  So as a practical matter, just having a few extra Queen pieces with your set is generally  suffifient.  I quess i'm just "old school" on this sort of thing...things that morph or "transform" make me uneasy.perhaps I digress...Just thinking outloud here.....

Ok Michael Bay, you may be taking this too far :P

Exploding pawns would be too much effort and potentially hazardous to your chess board; Megan Fox can't act, and Transformers was in every conceivable way a terrible film... and I don't just say that because Michael Bay is systematically trying to destroy my childhood, though while I'm here I will point out that Bay is a horrendously over-rated director; he's essentially a pyrotechnics, demolition and special effects kook who managed to blunder his way into film-making.

That being said, I think a simple prototype would be awesome, and if the idea works you could start trying to make something more elaborate. The book-piece idea would work quite simply, though perhaps the telescope idea is a better one; if you made the base of the pawns and the queen the same, then simply drawing the queen's tiara/crown out of the body would leave you with a queen identical to the real ones.

bquistorff: Do you think you could actually make a prototype?

origami chess (copywrite)  ;)

What about pawns that have detatchable heads so you can attach another thing to it?

A simple way to accomplish the same goal would be to play with chess dice where each face has a different piece.

Yeah, six sided dice would be perfect.

They should change colors too. Promoted queens turn pink. That would really intimidate an opponent.

although there are simple ways to accomplish this, like with detachable heads, or chess "dice" it would be really really really cool, if it could be engineered for a pawn actually morph into other pieces. it'd probably have to be limited to just queens or else it could become extremely difficult to do mechanically. preferable steam punk style ;D

I think the best you're going to get is a transformer style.  By that, I mean the old plastic toys.