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

I thought it moves by itself

Perfect for ages 8 and up to adult. Easy to use. Interesting and easy learning.

The pieces are a little smaller than expected, but not too much of a problem. Not easy to figure out without the direction to tell you what the display screen is saying.

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.

My son loves this electronic chess set! At its core, it's just a magnetic chess board and can easily be used without the electronic features. The pieces are very small, and I would consider it travel size as you could easily fit the board in your lap when travelling.Be aware that it does NOT have any special ability to "see" or detect where the pieces are, but it keeps track of them through a relatively simple button system. When moving a piece, you press down the piece (like pushing a button), then pressing down again on the new square when you make your move. This tells the chess board where you moved each piece, then it can respond by telling you where to move the computer's piece.It can be played using the LCD screen only (no sound or voice required, if you are in a shared space and don't want the extra noise), which is nice. Of course it is slightly more fun to have the computer verbally tell you where to move the piece. There is one problem that will make this board more difficult for new chess players or children: if they make a mistake and move a piece without "registering" it properly, it can be very difficult to fix the game and get the pieces back in the right spot. The game will stop you from making illegal moves or moving the wrong piece, but in the mid- to late-game my son would often get into a position where the board was telling him to move a piece that was no longer in that position, and he was not able to find where the piece should have been. This is especially the case if you are using the "take back" feature that lets you reverse a move if you make a mistake. While it does let you take the move back without any problems, it's easy to get the board in an unusable state if you aren't keeping track of each space perfectly.Still, it's not so much a problem with the chess board as it is a minimum amount of chess knowledge that is required to use the electronic play features. I won't hold that against the score because the chess set is a very neat design and very fun to use. 5 stars.