there are different approaches to make your texture. first you could create a plane with 8x8 squares. then extrude them and asign 2 different shaders to each of the extruded squares. otherwise you could use a layered shader with a checker-pattern (maybe turn down white color a little) assigned to transparency and/or the color channel of your plane. if you need to have a semiTransparent effect on one sort of your squares, think about to lay another plane on top of your chessboard - which is solid shaded - with another transparent shader adjusting specular channel or so. nevertheless you could create a shadernetwork without any extra geometry. I´d have a look at the helpfiles for hypershade.