Texturing multiple chessboards Let's say I'm going to be doing an instructional animation showing 100 different chessboards/positions (all at once, at one point). The chessboards are just planes of 8x8 faces.  The pieces will just be textures.

My question is how to structure the materials.

Originally, I thought of having all the 12 piece types on one image, and using a separate UV map per chessboard, and if a queen was at c3, then move 'c3' in the UV map to be over the queen.  However, this turned out to be rather messy, and not maintainable so I'm starting again.

The "brute force" method is to do all the work in Gimp and have 100 textures of a full board.  That is of course not efficient with 100 1024x1024 board textures.

Another idea is to use a different material per 'face', so then have 14 different materials (6 piece types 2 colors, 2 blanks)  and apply a different material to each square.

Note that I would also like to be able to show different positions on the 'same' board at one point, so having some way to animate between different squares having different pieces is a goal.

Is there an obvious way to do this that I'm missing?
It seems you are trying to do illustration work on a 3D modeling tool. 

Inkscape could be a much more adequate program for this. You will get the additional benefit of clean, unpixelated vector graphics.

If you want to do it in Blender then I'd say take advantage of its powers.

Model a clean board as a separate recyclable object. Texture it using a procedural checker texture as Dontwalk mentioned (one less image texture and unwrapping needed); then duplicate it around your scene as desired.

Then model your chess pieces also each as a separate recyclable objects and place them on each board instance at the planned position; even if they are just a bunch of simple flat planes or circles.

You can take advantage of easy independent positioning for each, and use snapping for precise placement, no need for dozens of different textures. You can still use image based textures for each piece if you prefer, but taking advantage of modeling might produce better results depending on what visuals you are looking for.

This way, you wont have duplicate textures, needless duplication of information and manual work painting each scenario as a pixel based image in a painting program.

If you are looking for plain flat colors and simple visuals you might not even need formal rendering and can quickly capture images directly from the OpenGL viewport preview.