Hey guys,
Just wanted to drop in and give some feedback and also highlight a few bugs, as well as practical flaws with the ChessUp2.
Firstly, I’d like to thank you for such a wonderful product. I can tell a lot of hard work has gone into this. It’s beautiful in many aspects.
Upon using ChessUp2 - there were a few things that as a user, I expected to be able to do - but couldn’t.
I’ll break this post into 3 sections: practical usage, bugs, and questions. Practical usage aims to highlight how I was using the board, app and interface; bugs will detail day one bug (10 mins of usage), and questions is pretty self explanatory.
Practical usage
- As a user, when I have multiple running existing games, I want a way to play them2.
- As a user, when I have a single existing game, I want to play
- As a user, I want to play against the latest model of stockfish that chess.com has
- As a user, I want to be able to play multi day variant time variants
None of the above appear to be achievable. While I can start a new game on the board, for people playing longer time variants like myself - this is almost immediately the first thing I noticed. It also feels as though it’s left the ‘out of the box’ experience pretty low quality. While some of these are difficult problems to solve, for instance in how do you flick between games, which game do you open first if there’s multiple, and how can you sync multiple games against things bots, this is really the sole reason I bought the board. It was so that I could spend the time setting it up, and looking at it from a ‘different angle’ other than online. Time setting these up should not be a hindrance; however, with the complete inability to do any of them, the idea fell flat.
Bugs:
- When starting a game bus ChessUp2, then logging into chess.com and viewing the same game, the game de-syncs, and my moves on the board no longer register. It also does not recognise my opponents moves. One of the main initial reasons I wanted to try this, was that as a user I have no idea how long you take to register my moves. This was the primary reason why I opened the app on my phone initially, but then after that, had to continue playing the game on the phone. As a part of fixing this, I would also suggest that you offer a way to resync the board - which leads back to the practical usage of: as a user, I want to open an existing game.
Questions
- Is there a codebase I could contribute to on GitHub, or otherwise? I would love to help contribute to the above fixes, as I think the idea is brilliant but misses some ‘polish’
- If no, is there an email or contact for someone working at ChessUp2? I would love to apply.
Overall, thank you so much for delivering what is an amazing piece of technology - something that bridges the gaps for chess noobs like myself, who are just learning. It also brings the techie out in me (software dev, if that wasn’t obvious), and I love the direction you’ve taken. With time, useful feedback, and the right attitude - this product will be kicking some serious goals, very soon.
If you require any information, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to provide any.
Regards,
Tom.