Building a Chess Board with Particles I'd like to create an animation of squares falling down (1) to form a chess board.

The squares would be falling in sequence and once at field level a chess part will emerge from it resizing from 0% to 100% (2) and (3).

So, here's my question:

I'm currently animating square by square and part by part. Is there an easier way?
I was thinking maybe particles or solid bodies would help...

I've seen tutorials where you can model/animate a group of objects and then use particles to populate a world, but so far I've only seen random worlds, nothing as structured as a chess board (8x8 squares). If I use rigid bodies and let the squares fall all of them fall at once and once they hit the ground they bounce a bit so it does not look perfect.

What would you do? is this a 100% manual task?
The falling grid is quite easy to do with particles :

I forgot some things in the original answer, added them in emphasis


add a Grid object with 9x9 subdivisions (= 8x8 faces) (Not strictly necessary, a simple Plane works as well)
add a ParticleSystem on it with Grid distribution, render Unborn, Died, no Emitter. Choose a Grid Resolution of 8.
create a object for your tile, and add it as a Dupli Object for your Psys. Adjust his Size.
create a Plane somewhere under your emitter, and in Physics enable Collision ; check Kill Particles. 




The falling effect is working but all the tiles have the same color. To avoid that, you can give them a material like this one :



The Checker texture use the texture coordinates of the Grid object ; otherwise, the checker will apply on each individual Tile object.

The mapping node "kills" the Z component of the coordinates ; otherwise, the tiles will change color while falling (as their Z coordinate changes). Change X and Y Scale to 0.8 match the pattern of the tiles