Electronic Self moving chess sets Info needed.
Question:
Does anybody know about these boards? Also what company(s) make these? Are there any antique ones? Do they work good? Move smoothly? Any help is great!
Answer:
I bought Excalibur Mirage about a month ago. It's a self-moving chess board from Excalibur Electronics. I'd been looking around to get the information on self-moving chess boards before I bought it, and this one seemed to be the only one in production. So there were not many choices for me. In a word, it's a crap. Don't waste your money on that. Yeah, maybe it's good for a show-window display, but not for your own use. I'd used it maybe three, four days (it's about $200, and I tried my best to adapt to it), and then throw it aside, returned to my usual Fritz-DGT pair. It uses magnets to move pieces. Each piece has a magnet in its base and a moving magnet under the board surface controls the movement of the piece. The first problem is, it's so loud when it moves pieces. The motor sound. Well, this one's bearable if it's the only problem (but I tell you it's really noisy). The second problem is it's so slow. Let's say you make e2-e4 and it tries to make e7-e5. First it has to move it's arm to e7 square, locks the pawn with magnet and then pulls it to e5 square. It takes about 5 seconds to complete its move. I mean this is the simplest move! If it makes long diagonal move, well, it may take as long as 10~15 sec. Oh, and there is a capture move. It first moves the captured piece to the side of the board, to the exactly designated place for the piece. And then it makes the capture move. It takes about 10~20 sec to complete. Worst of all, when you're finished with a game and press New Game button, it "automatically" arranges all the pieces (white & black) to their original squares. This is "mandatory" unless you press "reset" button everytime and place the pieces by yourself (and don't forget to adjust the levels again). Imagine moving 32 pieces with the speed I mentioned and how long you have to wait everytime you start a new game! If you arrange pieces yourself and press new game, it'd screw up since it thinks the pieces are in their "last-known" positions and tries to rearrange them no matter what. Finally, the worst of all, it lacks accuracy in its movement. It seems that the arm movement gets less and less accurate as it moves more and more pieces. Sometime during the game it recalibrates its arm position by moving the arm to a known position (somewhere in the corner - I can tell from the sound) and the move gets accurate again. But it doesn't last long. The result? It collides with other pieces when it makes a move and place the piece to off-the-center of a square. You have to adjust the piece positions that it collided with everytime it makes a move. And when you press new game, it triesto rearrage all the pieces with this inaccuracy, resulting in total mess. Well, there are other minor glitches but they are all endurable. Again, this one is not for everyday use. Maybe you can show it off to your friends to make them surprised (and swiftly put it aside before it makes too many moves), but it's not worth the money, is it?
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