Square Off Chess Play Learn Reviews

The square off app, which is required to use most of the functions of the square off board is awful. I stopped using it over a year ago and just recently got back on to see if any of the issues have been fixed, and they have not. Still very buggy. If you enter a game, your opponents time does not automatically start. They can just sit and there is still no way to abort the game, so you just have to resign. I’m not sure if this is a strategy by player to increase their rating or if they are legitimately having connectivity issues, but it happens quite often. SquareOffChessPlayLearn is basically unusable. Any ratings higher than a 2 star have got to be fake. Please download SquareOffChessPlayLearn and take a look before you buy any of the square off products. There are so many better options on the market now.

If SquareOffChessPlayLearn and board worked, it’d be amazing. As it is, the pieces slide—the board never really flattened out for me, the moves aren’t always recorded accurately, and there are no ways to adjust moves—you have to resign or pause/quit. I first had issues with the five free AI games—all but one glitched so I couldn’t finish any of them except the last one. Then, I had to pay to play the AI. I subscribed for $29/year, but it didn’t register on my app, the free trial registered, but now I’m trying to find a way to cancel my paid subscription. This is all frustrating since no one wants to give back $, I’m on a scavenger hunt for answers. Customer support is not helpful, I got a robo-email response saying SquareOff was acquired by Miko and to wait for further updates. Great. I’m over this ridiculous concept—it could’ve been great but it’s too buggy and frustrating. Do the old-school board w/pieces, so much simpler.

I got the square off pro as a gift that I had been wanting as soon as I saw it. I loved it so much until I played several games and realized that SquareOffChessPlayLearn doesn’t recognize pawn promotion properly. I thought it was a glitch but the same problem happens each time I attempt to promote a pawn. This makes these expensive boards essentially unusable as promotion is an essential part of every endgame in chess.

I place the pawn on the promotion square, and half of a menu pops up on SquareOffChessPlayLearn that I imagine has all the pieces you can promote to. I can neither scroll through this menu or select a piece for promotion and I sit there and forfeit the match as I can’t continue but my time continues to go down. If this is fixed it’s a 5 star product, but I’m deeply disappointed right now.

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

We love our grand kingdom set. It’s been going on strong for 5 years. SquareOffChessPlayLearn , however has a big concern from me. My son has an account to learn chess and play with the board. He is getting inappropriate messages that say “Hi”. Luckily, he cannot open them! However, there are no options to block or delete them! There should be a way to deactivate messaging in SquareOffChessPlayLearn , but there is not. Also, as a side note, I wish there were a way to use SquareOffChessPlayLearn (he has a Plus account) with a pass and play feature to play chess with someone next to you without the board. Seems like an easy thing to do and overlooked by the developers.

SquareOffChessPlayLearn is great but my problem is when playing the game the other person taking a very long time it’s been a month now and still no move was made also there’s no way I could communicate with the person while playing the game to let him or her know to make a move so does that mean I won the game or do I have to wait for this person to make a move I would love to play with other people instead of waiting on this one person and I don’t want to quit or resign because this person about to lose or decided to stop playing for some reason

I have followed all directions and the Square Off Pro sits there with lights blinking after the first move, plus the battery indicator light is glitchy. I have contacted customer service but have a feeling this is a dud of a Christmas present.
UPDATE: are they giving me the runaround? They asked me to ask for support in SquareOffChessPlayLearn and promised 24 hour turn around. No response and it’s past 24 hours, going on 32. There is a seven day window to return the item. No response so far from customer service and there is no return address provided, so I have to wait for their response. Plus there is a 20% restocking fee? I hope this is resolved satisfactorily, but right now I am an unhappy customer.

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 SquareOffChessPlayLearn 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 SquareOffChessPlayLearn 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 SquareOffChessPlayLearn 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.

SquareOffChessPlayLearn has ads and in order use this ap you need to already have the board so ads are annoying. The chess pieces are cheap plastic and too light so they tip over easily. It will take a little getting used to using the ap with the board and had issues updating the board and tech support did not respond so not a good sign. It does work just a little buggy which is a pain so do some practice games first to get the hang of it. The ap does drain the phone battery and played four games before needing to charge my phone up. The first three levels are very easy and great for someone who has no idea how to play. No diagnostics are available and the easiest fix is turn off the board and back on and reconnect. The magnetic pieces will stick together at times and again the biggest issue with the game is the cheap pieces. For spending 400 bucks I was hoping for better chess pieces and not cheap Chinese plastic pieces. The ap works though and can stay connected at six to ten feet from the board from experimenting. Locking can be a pain because the hole does not always line up. The board is heavy and quality it appears just the cheap pieces.

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 SquareOffChessPlayLearn or even take a picture of the board)?
- too many buttons in SquareOffChessPlayLearn 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

Let me start off by saying this is a great product, with a friendly community that uses it. It is a must have if you are an avid chess player. However, the support team is terrible. It will take days or weeks to get a response through email or SquareOffChessPlayLearn if you are having issues, on top of that; ordering the board from the company is an extreme haste and waste of time. My board was supposed to take 45 days to deliver, it took almost 3 months. Even when I expected it to be delayed from the pandemic, when you pay almost 500 dollars for a chess board, the support team should be better and it should be delivered when promised.

SquareOffChessPlayLearn also has issues. As a 2030 rated user, it takes a very long time for someone to accept a challenge. Sometimes a challenge won’t be accepted at all, leaving me to play the computer when I want to play against a real player. Furthermore, the streaming function does not work as advertised. You cannot stream live games straight to your board, there is a small selection of games within SquareOffChessPlayLearn that you may stream, this issues needs to be addressed.

All in all I love the product, but it needs major improvement, if it were slightly worse I wouldn’t even consider rating it 3 stars

I’m 15 and I got the square off pro board recently for Christmas and it is honestly just such a creative and awesome product. The Bluetooth connection is simple and easy and you can play people all around the world in RATED GAMES!!!! There’s just one problem with SquareOffChessPlayLearn … The analyzing tool is terrible. It barely gives you any feed back on how to improve your skills and the bar that shows you who is winning and who is not is not accurate at all. If you fix this I will rate SquareOffChessPlayLearn five stars!!

The board itself (SquareOff Pro) looks and feels great, but the experience playing in SquareOffChessPlayLearn is unreliable at best. When the board gets into an error state, it is unrecoverable and the game must be abandoned. This makes me look like I’m abandoning games (sometimes in a winning position) which reflects poorly on my profile and ruins the experience for my opponent as well.

Update: I received a response in SquareOffChessPlayLearn the day after posting this, and the following day the issue was fixed! SquareOffChessPlayLearn is still a battery hog, but overall this is a really great product and I’m thankful to the developers of it. I hope the team can tighten up their QA a bit in the future, but for now I’m back to enjoying my SquareOff Pro!

Everything is fine with SquareOffChessPlayLearn . It functions properly as far as I can tell, will need to revise after j get my new board though. Only thing I’ve see. Wrong is with the tournament page. On the page where it describes out the tournaments work, it says that the Retention zone is where you get demoted to the previous tournament group, and that the demotional zone is where you stay in your current tournament group. It should be the other way around.

If you have any questions about the product before or after purchase this company will be on top of it. The board is of serious quality. I was hesitant to spend the money, but couldn’t pass it up when there was a little sale. We have 3 people in our chess club that have one now. It is useful when there isn’t a game open for people near their rating. They can play a game near their level on the SquareOff board then get analysis from higher rated players. I don’t care for the engine format that is used if I had to pick a downside. You can tether your accounts to chess dot com or lichess dot com and use the engine you prefer with little to no hassle. It is also a neat talking piece for chess lovers

I just received my SWAP and had a couple of issues to start with. The issues were rectified, by the customer service team, in just a few hours. All of the instructions were clear and concise to get board recognized, connected and working completely. After the son-in-law (for whom this was purchased) saw it working (moving by itself), he was in thrilled about it, too. The kids all want SquareOffChessPlayLearn on their devices so they can learn and play chess. They were hoping there really were Harry Potter chess pieces but settled for the “invisible player” movements. What also makes it so nice is that the lights help guide the player throughout the game. The different levels, game moves, challenges, tournaments, events, apps it can connect to and work with, people around the world you can challenge, or be challenged by, and countless other ways to play, makes this so unique. SquareOffChessPlayLearn works flawlessly (so far-don’t prove me wrong) with the SWAP. Very easy to use SquareOffChessPlayLearn with the board. The only suggestion for change is to make the phone stand a little higher so the phone can be charging while playing.

I have a chess set that was a gift and after just 6 months of play one of the black nights quit moving. I contacted customer service and they told me that I would need the purchase confirmation by e-mail so they could check to see if the system is under warranty. The problem is, it was a Christmas gift. I don’t have that information .You had no problem letting me know the cost of a whole set of replacement pieces though. The thought that a singular chess piece can’t be purchased or even comped is asinine, especially considering the cost of the product. Totally not satisfied with the service. Do better.

Customer support is available to chat in the Square Off app right away when you receive your board. I got my Grand Kingdom Refurbished Chess Board in the mail about a week ago. At first, the board did not work correctly at all; the pieces would not move. After messaging with Customer Support back and forth for the past week, my board finally works properly! It needed to be updated to the latest firmware but SquareOffChessPlayLearn was not working. So the team updated SquareOffChessPlayLearn today and now I was able to update my board’s firmware & WOW- this board is like magic. It’s truly unreal and so incredible to watch the pieces actually move on their own. Really really happy with this product, SquareOffChessPlayLearn , and the amazing customer service. Thank you Square Off for existing during this weird coronavirus situation, you guys are the best. Will absolutely recommend Square Off to everyone.

A lot of fun to play with. It is only getting better. Hopefully “Victor” comes out soon. I have found SquareOffChessPlayLearn and the actual board to be wonderful Chess companion when I can’t find someone to play against. SquareOffChessPlayLearn is always kept up to date. As far as I know, SquareOff keeps using the most up to date Chess Engine. I now own the Kingdom and the “Pro” sets. I also bought the Neo, and hopefully, when I receive it, SquareOffChessPlayLearn works with it as well. So, in summary, if you love chess, SquareOffChessPlayLearn is definitely worth a try. I definitely recommend it.

Bought this board back in February, played for a month or so while i was really into chess then i got busy with college and it fell off. Now my fall semester is ending and im getting into chess again, and i love the new user interface, lot less, dated/experimental then the UI i used a few months ago. Love the streamlined look of everything. Sad that about yet another subscription based company, but i guess that's how it gonna be for the foreseeable future.