Square Off Chess- Play & Learn

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My son is in Chess Club so we got him this for Christmas and he LOVES it. The board is well made and the software works well enough that he can play the computer or other players online. However the app needs a lot of improvements to really earn 4 or 5 stars and reach the potential the makers promised. First, the challenge system needs to be more robust. Right now it’s hit or miss if you can get someone to accept a challenge and often a challenge notice comes up but when you open the app the challenge is not shown as active, even if the message just came in. The ability to teach or learn in computer only mode is vital and missing. Even just the ability to take back a move against the CPU would help. Also the ability to stream games (which is highly promoted in the company’s site and ads) does not work with the board. Streaming only works with the app which is not what is implied/promised in every video. Watching streaming on the BOARD is a must that must be solved. Other improvements like stats and friend only leaderboards would greatly enhance the player experience. Hopefully updates are coming soon. All in all, this is a great way for my son to play Chess when other opponents are not around, and the potential is very high if software improvements continue.

So excited for this to be real. Hardware is impeccable but it still needs a few additions to software to really work. And to be clear, I think you should buy this pro deuce, bc they will obviously improve the software in tune. Must haves: - you need a board reconciliation tool, for when hardware and software get mixed up on board config. It happened in 2 of 3 ai games I played, and both times, that had to be the end of game (maybe a manual fix in the app or even take a picture of the board)? - too many buttons in the app automatically log you out or end the game, and never is it necessary or logical. Why would you ever log out unless you intentionally hit a log out button? And if you hit: “lock the board”, and decide not to lock it, the present game is over and you can’t get it back. It should be harder for a game to be lost. “Are you sure you want to end game?” - can you allow for auto log in feature? It’s a chess game, not sure you should ever need to log out. it’s harder to stay signed in than my banking app

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The board is really nice and the software works really well but, the only problem I have is that when my opponent moves, it takes 10-20 seconds before I can move my pieces. This causes me to lose valuable time on the clock and makes it hard for me to play online using the chess board. One of the main reasons I bought this board was to play online but, its getting difficult and frustrating to use this board because of this issue. If you could improve this app a little better it would really compliment the board and more people would be interested to buy it as this is a really smart board.

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The idea is good but the software is garbage. 1) there is no way to report bugs when there is a software crash unless it’s somehow doing it in the background but i don’t think so since it can’t seem to detect it crashed. how can the software improve if it’s just the employees testing ? an entire user base would cover more real world scenarios and give you much better feedback.. 2) there is no way to save the state of a game or load the state of the game after a crash. this is very easily implemented by storing each move and allowing the users to agree on what the game state was. now you can’t even see the history of the moves ...this would at least move me from one star review to three star review 3) playing versus the AI or versus friends multiple bugs have happened causing the game to be scrapped. i’ve only had it 1 day and on 4 separate occasions the game has had to be scrapped . playing against the AI seems to have less bugs. however this is not a rare occurrence. im not trying to rag on the company and normally don’t write bad reviews but for the price of this board and for what you actually get, i had to do it. hopefully the company puts additional effort to hire more software developers. looking forward to the bug fixes

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When I press the chess piece to move it I can hardly hear the “beep” and it takes several tries to get the piece to register. No in structions on how to place captured pieces, do I press the corresponding piece on the side, etc, I have a Milton Bradley from 1983, which does exactly what this set is supposed to do and without the trouble I am experiencing, I thought this would have been an upgrade to my 1983 set, but it doesn’t seem to be, for starters how about a instruction booklet, why are you assuming everyone who buys this know chess completely, I’m not a good player, I know moves, etc, but how this set works would have been nice, PLEASE TURN UP THE VOLUME ON THE “beep”!!