“ChessUp has good ideas but trying to play against others on chess.com or lichess is problematic and puts you at a disadvantage. Having to move your opponents pieces costs you time. You end up watching the screen and the ChessUp board. Makes blitz or fast time controls a problem. It is fun however.”
“I always liked playing with a physical chess board than playing it on the phone never knew something like this was out there that you can play a game online through the board. Until I found it on YouTube. At first when I got it it was defective and was scared that I purchased something that wasn’t going to work out so I reached out to the company through Amazon and the company responded faster than I expected and fixed the issue by sending me a replacement one as easily considering the circumstances. If I purchased something from another company I hope they are as good as them. I would recommend it for people that are learning or wants to play online on physical board.”
“I do love this board. It’s really worth the money - the only issue is the chess.com matching feature is buggy. Like to actually get a game going is a bit challenging because of the connectivity bugs. But otherwise it’s worth the money.”
“Everything is good except when I try to castle. The pieces quality is decent, board works amazing, lot of options, few left out things, you can't analiyse, and when you try to castle it thinks you played the rook but the king doesn't move. That's pretty much it!”
“Excellent, just excellent. I love playing on a physical board against online opponents. The OTB experience for 2 for a little confusing when using the help feature but once we found documentation on what the colors meant it made more sense.”
“The board itself is excellent with a good battery life and quick charge time. The (free) mobile companion app is also excellent with a variety of very useful lessons programmed to be visualised on the board directly, such as checkmate patterns, tactics, master games etc
There are also options for the board to use the onboard engine to highlight the best moves for you when playing against bots, this feature is excellent for learning new lines or reviewing tactics.
The only downside so far is that, even though the board is sponsored by chess.com, the integration with chess.com is awful. It takes a very long time to find a game (if it finds one at all) and even when you do find a game, you may often lose connection which results in a loss. However, it does have excellent integration with Lichess which I have now decided to switch to for the time being. On Lichess, the connection is far far more stable and you can find matches very easily.
I give this board 4/5 stars with the hopes that the chess.com features will be fixed and workable in the near future.”
