Tournament MIL850

UPDATE: The board is working again after House of Staunton and the manufacturer came through on the warranty. So considering that it at least it failed during warranty I have upgraded my review. Overall I would say for the money the Chessnut Air Pro is a better deal for the money. -------------------------------------------- This is a very nice board. I don't agree with the French review that says the pieces are cheap (but maybe he or she has a better eye than I do for these things). The board is useless without the grossly over-priced ChessLink (which is basically not much more than a bluetooth device in a plastic box). Google 'Millenium ChessLink' for more info. They sell other products that you can use instead but the bottom line is the board does not even have its own power source. I guess you have to consider that part of the already high cost of the board. It's kind of annoying that this important fact is missing from the description. There is one important design flaw. There is a gold dimmer button attached to the side of the board. The button faces the players. You barely have to touch it (which you will, trust me) to turn off all the LEDs. Until I realized what was happening, I was accidentally dimming the board and I thought it was malfunctioning (the software would make a move and nothing would light up). Other people have had the same experience. This is a completely avoidable flaw. Put the button somewhere else, make it harder to accidently invoke, etc. Not rocket surgery. All that said, for me these aren't the biggest problems. Three weeks ago, my ChessLink stopped powering the board. The ChessLink will not come on whenever it is connected to the board. So the board gets no power and is a brick. Slowly, I was sent a new ChessLink and the problem persists--so the problem is with the board. The responsiveness of the Millenium's support person has been PATHETICALLY SLOW. At one point it took and extra 3 or 4 days just because the seller had a simple question about which cable to send which for some reason took that long to answer (I had to email as to the status...who knows how long it would have been otherwise). I have been without a board for over 3 weeks and over half of that is due to time waiting for answers. The current status is that we just determined that the ChessLink is not the problem and the support needs to ask the engineer if he has any ideas as to what might be the problem (seriously, you couldn't have relayed this scenario to him about it by now??). Oh, and the engineer is on vacation (apparently to the moon where there is no email). So, add another 3 days just waiting to get an answer to a question. I will update the review and possibly the rating as circumstances evolve.

Playing against a computer with this board is very natural. The square of the piece the computer wants to move lights up and then the square it wants you to move to lights up. With the "Chess Classics Element Millennium Chess Computer" sold separately this is a great set. The 4"king pieces are very nice. It is a true 55 cm board. A little over 21 inches square. So it is quite large. I kept it. I like it. But I like the smaller one better for my purposes even though the, still wood, pieces are not quite as nice.