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 Great for the price and the use it will recieve Oct 26, 2009
This Chess set was the perfect answer to a dillemma. My boyfriend is serving our country over in Iraq. We both play chess and we were both going to miss being able to play very much. Right before he left, he mailed me a package with a chess set he had picked out for me. And enclosed "the rules" these rules simple put it that each person could make a move over IM, Letter Or email and could only make one turn per contact. This sounded great to me, but he did not have a chess set. Since they move him around quite a bit a regular chess set would have been cumbersome and setting it up and taking it down would have been problematic as well.
I found this chess set on Amazon and although it has a couple of minor things that i would have liked to be better, it is an excellent overall product.
The Queen and King could be a tad easier to distinguish, but despite that, the magnets could hold the peices in place even shaking it around, the lid stayed on securely, and provided the perfect answer to our dillema.
Now My boyfriend can still play chess with me from the otherside of the planet, in a war zone. Having this little chess set is allowing me to somehow feel a little closer and to help him keep his spirits up. This little chess set is in an indirect way supporting our troops.
Thanks for such a space saving, Portable product!
drueke chess set review Jun 05, 2009
it's a nice set. i love that you can save your game, unlike the other boards that fold in half. the magnets are fairly strong. it's somewhat hard to tell the pawns from the bishops. a tiny dab of white paint would fix that.
the lid doesn't really lock onto the base when you close it. so far this hasn't been a problem, but i feel that it should 'lock' on there somehow.
it's the best travel chess set i've had.
Convenient, portable Chess Set for people on the go May 14, 2009
Overall, I like this chess set. It is a great value for the price, and fulfills it's purpose, to play chess on travel or on the go. For example, my son and I played chess at a theme park while waiting in line for rides, and my son uses it on the school bus.
Positives: Case is well-built, seems strong enough, my son threw the closed set to me 15 feet away, landing it on the pavement, and the case was not damaged. Pieces really stick to the board, and are short enough you can close the box, put it in your backback, get it out later, and your game is intact. It's big enough to see and move the pieces (I've had tiny sets). But it's small enough to fit in a backback and to hold easily with one hand while moving pieces with the other. Case is attractive.
Negatives: Case and pieces are plastic, and on the aforementioned throw, one of tiny tabs marking a rook broke off. All the pieces are the same size, and the bishops look too much like pawns -- but people have fixed that by putting a dot of paint on the Bishop heads, and we will do that soon.
Biggest negative: The paint is wearing off the black squares, and we've only had this a month or two. The problem is the magnets are strong, and if you slide your pieces, the friction is like sanding the board. You really need to pick up the pieces to move them, but then you have to be careful because if you go too close you can magnetically pull other pieces off the board. I don't know if this is peculiar to our board, because it seems a thin coat of clear finish would have solved this problem. We might contact the company to see if we can get a replacement, but it looks like it would be easy enough to repaint if we had to.
But the paint doesn't come off MUCH, so it's still easy to tell which square is which.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
 Total Disappointment May 08, 2009
I don't often review a product, but I was so totally disappointed in this 4.5 star product that I felt a need to voice my thoughts. First of all the chess set only came with 7 black pawns. Thus the game was not even playable. Second the peices are plastic crap. It is hard to tell peices apart. Third the lid does not fit tightly on the gamebox (it would fall off if turned upside down) What is the point of the lid if it would not stay on when placed in a backpack, etc. If this product was priced at $9.99 I would not complain much. I returned this junk for a refund.
 Best practice chess set ever! Apr 15, 2009
I have had many a chess set in my day, and this set exceeds all others in leaps and bounds as far as personal practice is concerned. I often travel to coffee shops etc to study, and this board is ideal! It's very slim and relatively wide (as opposed to a chunky board that folds in half), and is therefore very easy to slip into a bag where another chess set might be awkward. The beauty of not having to fold it in half and pack the pieces inside to transport it is that you can have a position set up, close it up and take it somewhere else, and resume your study without having to record the position or reset-up the board.
The magnets in this board are UNBELIEVABLE. You can carry this board, fully set up in some random position and sitting completely on its side, in your bag for days and not a single piece will shift. In fact, you can shake it up in all directions and not a piece will move a millimeter! That's where this board really shines, and why it's invaluable for personal study and for travel. The pieces are also very distinct (I don't know about you, but I HATE it when the bishops look like pawns and the knights look like blobs), although there were some plastic bits sticking off the pieces from the molding process when I got the board, which I easily trimmed off with a small scissors. I also glued the magnets onto the bottom of the pieces, although it didn't seem that any pieces were in danger of becoming unseated. My only issue is that it can be hard to tell the bishops from the pawns from the top, and so I used a sharpie marker and white-out to opposite-color the tips of the bishops, which easily remedied the problem. I have a friend (for whom I bought this board) who didn't off-color the bishop tops, and he's always blaming his losses on mistaking an enemy bishop for a pawn. ;)
Now onto what I don't like about this board: Because the board has a lip, and the pieces are short (so that you can close the lid with them set up), it can be hard to get a horizontal view of the board, which I like to be able to do. You're much more limited to looking at the board from above, although you get used to it and I wouldn't consider it a hindrance to study. I will play my friend who has this board on it, since we're both used to it, but I might feel like I had an advantage playing someone unused to the board. Of course, it's not a big deal and you absolutely could use it for a game board if you wanted. I also don't like that when the pieces are around the edge of the board (I usually stick them there when they're captured), the top doesn't sit right (although it closes and stays closed fine, it just sits slightly askance). On my friend's board, some of the white pieces are slightly different colors, as if they came form 2 different batches, although all my pieces match.
Overall, I LOVE this board, would recommend it to ANYONE, and would be personally insulted if you didn't buy one immediately. ;)
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