Virtual Chess on a Real Board

At CES in Las Vegas we stumbled across an attracted chess board. Wood carved pieces on a nice and sturdy looking board. One person was playing with the black pieces, he made a move and then something rather amazing happened… the white side made their move. The pieces moved themselves. Literally sliding across the board. When the white side made a kill it would slide into the square and the black piece would slide out to the side. No pieces hit each other on the way, they moved with absolute precision. We were obviously curious…

There are three modes on the Square Off chess board and they’re rather advanced:

• Square Off mode: Challenge anybody from anywhere in the world. This allows you to play board vs board or if they don’t have a Square Off board then they can use the app.
• Training mode: Train with 20 difficulty levels of the board’s artificial intelligence engine. This means you’ll be playing against the machine, you’ll definitely learn where you need to improve
• Live Stream: Tune into a chess tournament from anywhere in the world. You can record the matches and replay the moves on the board whenever you want.

The top two modes are likely to be the most used we think. While there are plenty of chess apps available for iPad we just love the tactile part of board games, feeling the pieces, hitting the enemy when you kill them. The feeling of removing their piece from the board. This puts both worlds together perfectly.

The Square Off is available for pre-order on Indiegogo from $249 USD + worldwide shipping. We’ve seen it working and even if you just used it as a manual person to person board, it looks great for the money.

More info Square Off

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