Well, the mesh is definitely far too dense! I tried continuing from what I had - I was quite pleased to start with, as it definitely began to look like a horse's head! But there are just too many damn faces, and they're all being squashed up under the neck. So I decided to do as I was told and start simple. A simple 128-face sphere is actually okay for the top of a pawn, so I started with that. And I can easily manipulate this sphere to get the cross for the king, the crown for the queen, or the rough shape for the bishop. The rook's castellations are just about acceptable but need more thought. As for the knight, the 128-face sphere can be twisted quite neatly to form the basic shape for the neck, but  I added a second 128-face sphere for the actual horses head. (I haven't incorporated this extra sphere into the other pieces yet, but it will give me enough faces to do the slot in the bishop and make the others a bit more fancy) For the details on the knight (i.e. eyes, mouth, nostrils and ears), maybe the easiest approach would be to extrude the appropriate faces to give me extra vertices in just the areas I need them? These extra vertices will simply flatten into the original faces for the other pieces.

Thanks again Tantarus/AirFlamesRed - this seems a much better approach. I have plenty more WIPs that I'll take a fresh look at now as well!

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The 3Dcheapskate* occasionally posts sensible stuff. Usually by accident.
And it usually uses Poser 11, with units set to inches. Except when it's using Poser 6 or PP2014, or when its units are set to PNU.

*also available in ShareCG, DAZ, and HiveWire3D flavours (the DeviantArt and CGBytes flavour have been discontinued).