Talking Chess Academy with Voice Teaching System, Electronic Chess Set with Strong Magnetic Pieces, Electronic Chess Board with Rating ELO 2000, Smart Chess Board Great for Brain Training

My son is very interested in learning to play chess better. This is a great asset to that journey! This will provide a great tutor substitute that is fun to play with when you have no one else to play. It is small enough to take on trips and overall, a great investment for my son for Christmas.

A little small for my fat fingers.

I got this for my kids who wanted to n learn how to play chess. I like that this one you can play with each other or against the computer, it's a great educational tool and I love that it keeps them away from screens. Overall I am very happy with this purchase

I had pretty high hopes for this thing, but wow, this was worse than I ever thought could be possible. First off, let’s say the couple cool things this does. When the device wants to tell you its move, it shows on the screen C2:C4, and to mark that move as completed it’s really ingenious, you just push the piece into the board slightly and it makes a beep and then you move it to the new spot and push it into the board there slightly and it makes another beep to confirm the move was completed and then the display clears out and it’s your turn. This is such a really interesting idea for an easy way to interact with The computer controlling the pieces and for it to know where your pieces and its pieces are located at all times. I honestly was so excited when I figured out that the whole top of the board was pressure sensitive and thought this was going to be incredible at first. Now for all the negative stuff. The machine constantly hallucinates, and says to move pieces to places that they can’t go to (like it just told me to move it’s bishop and jump over it’s pawns in the very first move of the game, which bishops cannot jump pawns.) Several times the board told me to move a piece from one place to another, But there wasn’t a piece in the original spot to move in the first place. Because the computer has no idea where chess pieces are supposed to move or where the chess pieces are for some reason even though you tell it by pushing into the board to prove that they’re there, this is basically unplayable as the computer makes moves all the time that can’t happen or there’s piece there at all. In addition to all the issues I mentioned above the actual buttons on the board could not be less intuitive if they tried. There’s literally a button labeled verify, there’s a button labeled “why?”, there’s a button labeled “legal”, And then a button label famous. All of these buttons are explained in the instruction manual on the first page, but I think it’s just kind of ridiculous that these buttons are not intuitively labeled enough to easily use without reading the manual. All the time when you’re playing the game if you’re not sure what button to press and you press one just thinking that might be the right button, the device will make like a negative beeping noise at you like you did something wrong. And honestly it does that so much it seems like you can almost not press any buttons while you’re in the middle of a game even if you think you would be able to press it like the move button or the button with a horse on it, it’s just so weird. Lastly on top of all of that, magnets in some spots on the board are much weaker than other spots, which just is a little bit weird when you set the piece down but don’t feel it totally lock to the board like the other pieces. The device comes with 128 puzzles and solutions as well as a whole instruction manual that’s 19 pages long for how to use the thing, as well as all the pieces and a nice carrying bag for all those pieces, but none of that really helps with the fact that this is basically not playable, at least the one I received was. Overall I give this a 0/10, definitely do NOT recommend, I absolutely don’t recommend it at this price, and honestly I wouldn’t recommend it even if it was free. I’m going to keep testing it out and reread the instruction manual to see if I missed some steps, but so far, this thing is absolutely terrible.

I used to play with an electronic chess set as a kid and have long wanted to get another one. It was really helpful to have as a kid because the device is set up to only allow you to make legal moves, essentially teaching you the proper moves that each piece can make. This chess set is very similar with additional features. I suggest taking your time going through the manual to fully understand how to program the chess board to work for the game mode that you want to use. Overall, this is worth the purchase and makes for a great gift for all ages.

Let me start with this: I'm a terrible, terrible chess player. A few years ago, I entered two beginners chess tournaments and ended up with a 2-4 record - largely against elementary school students. And this machine beat the tar out of me in the first game we played, despite the fact that it was set at one of the easiest levels. So while I thought this was a perfectly fine way to learn chess, I'm not sure it would be useful who is in any way experienced or sophisticated with the game. Although it doesn't explicitly say so, I have the strong feeling that it's designed for kids and younger people to learn the game. But it was fun to play. The tutorials and hints were helpful, and I'll certainly play it again in the future. It comes with a nice carrying bag for the pieces, a set of "Learning Chess Cards" that are very fundamental, a decent instruction manual, and a book of chess puzzles that also appear to be incorporated into the machine. A few caveats: (1) If you're like me, you're bound to lose a chess piece or two over time, and while these appear to be specialized chess pieces, it's not clear how you can go about replacing them - as far as I can tell, the only contact information for the manufacturer is a street address in China on the side of the box; (2) the chess pieces don't move automatically; you have to read the notations on the display and move your opponent's pieces yourself; (3) the battery compartment could only be opened with a small Phillips-head screwdriver - not included, but I managed to scrounge one up. Also, there are a lot of safety caveats that come with this game; for example, rechargeable batteries cannot be used in the game, old and new batteries cannot be mixed, and the game cannot be disposed of in a normal waste bin but must be deposited at a collection point for electrical scrap. I'm not sure how this compares with other more sophisticated products, but it's a nice tool in the hands of someone like me, who isn't very good at the game but wants to get better.