ChessUp 2 tips and notes

What even is ChessUp

Just got my Chessup 2 board, sad to say I can't use it yet as 4 pieces aren't recognized. I forced a firmware update, poked holes in the felt, and used board editor to confirm. Hopefully they'll reply soon and send me working pieces because on paper this is everything I'm looking for.

Probably me. Thanks for the tip!

I got my board today...

I was soooo happy, like a kid at Christmas...

My daughter and I started to play, and .... midgame the white king started to act up... and for the second game it refuses to cooperate. Please advise

Just got my board. Amazing. Is there any sound at all? Thanks

Sounds like overall that this is a great product with many, many launch-day glitches. Hope they sort these things out. It costs too much money to have anything not working when you get it.
(edit: I say this as someone who currently cannot use their board because it came with a bad rook. waiting two weeks for a replacement piece)

I cancelled my kickstarter order after I saw Danny Rench say in a video that he has experienced problems using the chessup2 board! I am thankful I did after reading all the issues with this new board.

I am waiting for my order to arrive. Let’s hope that there are hundreds of happy customers for each unhappy 🙏

We are supposed to email them. Sounds like they will send us new pieces. I hope so because FOUR of mine don't work.

There usually are. Not many happy people post, so the posts get skewed towards the issues side.

I am happy with mine, small issue with the WiFi but it works fine with the app. Glitches and issues like this always crop up on new products/technologies. Kickstarter projects. Chessnut, which has pretty rock-solid products, had issues with the Air at first and the Evo had lots of bugs. The Chessup 1 had issues as well but that is great platform.

The issues will get worked out, Jeff and his team are great and are always working to iron things out.

Probably for the best. New products like this always have issues when they first hit the wild. It is the price you pay for being on the bleeding edge.

You have to know it going in and just be confident that they will be fixed. After my experience with Chessup 1 I know that anything that is wrong will be fixed, and new features will be added.

But things like this are not for the faint of heart.

I will say that although I'm frustrated, I do appreciate how candid Jeff has been in the Chessup.com forum about the issues. I'm just dying to use this gorgeous board, but the openness is very reassuring and I'm hopeful they'll send me working pieces as soon as they can. I'm particularly interested in the 2 player function, hoping to get my husband to play Chess with me using the assist mode.

I totally understand that first "Vikings " are experiencing some problems. I was just hoping that it wouldn't be me... haha

I also hope that the bad king is the ONLY bad piece, but it's hard to check, since it takes 20 min ( or more) to get that "bad, bad King" to register, so that I can start the game ( and play only until it calls for the white king to be moved... lol).

I just want to try out as much as I can, so that once the "white king " issue is fixed, I don't discover a few more bad pieces ( then I will cry for real).

Otherwise, I am IN LOVE with the board, it looks and feels AMAZING. I am totally enjoying that I don't have to "pin" my phone to it ( especially if it's not me but my kid who's playing). And it is very intuitive ( the tiny screen actually is big enough. lol)

My kid and I just can't stop playing with lbl 6 assistance, so that we can check EVERY piece ( twice), and watch the "disco" style menu of moves...

We will be caught up on bad piece replacement shipments today/tomorrow at latest - sorry for the bad white king.
And don't worry - once that is replaced it will work great.

Very sorry about the bad pieces. We will have all these replacement pieces out this week.
Entire staff is working late tonight and tomorrow so we can clear all customer emails.
Also can message me direct with the order number and what is faulty and I can place the replacement order.

So - there are not hundreds, there are 10s of thousands. We have hundreds playing online simultaneously all hours of the day already.
That is what everyone is seeing happen. ChessUp 2 has more units delivered in 2 weeks than any competing smart board model has delivered in the past 2 years combined. You are witnessing 2+ years of customer support crammed into 1 month. Also why our email is backed up by a couple of days.
We pride ourselves on making each customer taken care of and if we can''t, please ship it back to us. We also deliver the best over the board tech with touch sense + piece recognition. Plus built in WiFi (which is hard to implement) makes the experience of immersing OTB so good.
It is really unfortunate when a bad piece stops the fun, and we are getting all those replacements out ASAP. It is ~2% of people affected that we can tell. We take full accountability. 2% of many thousands is a lot of people to take care of. And we will take care of every single one.
It is also unfortunate when we have a disconnect or other bug that interrupts a game. But again, these are just new release issues and will quickly be resolved. We are tracking it all, fixing it all, and take full ownership of delivering the best play experience that you can trust 100%.
Pieces seemed to be concentrated in one sub-batch, it was a factory error. Easy to fix. We can ship software fixes 1 million times for free and we do that (ChessUp 1 still gets new features 2+ years after launch). Any glitches are short lived - we are almost wrapped up with the next push of online play patches - very robust once we release our disconnect/reconnect new flow. It is the hardware that matters. The ChessUp 2 platform has the most complete tech and will be a pleasure to use for years moving forward.
You see me in this forum, reddit, our forum - everywhere - because the users are going to end up with a great experience and I will make sure of it.

We shipped almost 1 million chess pieces. We have replaced 200~300 pieces and expect it to finish up around ~500.
Next 1 million will be near zero, this was a first batch issue and is being addressed at the factory with tighter controls on the testing->packing flow. I am not proud of the issue by any means, but everyone will be made right.

I received my board yesterday and have only played one game. It seems really good so far, but I do have 2 complaints. First, and not very importantly, the pieces don't look good. They look amateurishly done. Second, and more importantly, there doesn't seem to be a manual. It's not in the box (typical of today's products) but I can't find anything either in the app or online. Perhaps I'm missing something or looking in the wrong places. A manual would be helpful in learning how to use the board. I had difficulty getting hooked up to Chess.com and starting a game, although I eventually got it. I'll try again today and see how it goes.

Overall, I like it.

For #1 - The display does flip for black - I don't understand. If you could share a video/picture of yours not doing it, I would like to see it so we could investigate.
For #2 - blitz/bullet can be fun for a smart board, but you are going to get destroyed on rating playing anything that fast. Super fast formats are for online software chess. Smart boards are best used for 5+5, 10+0 and beyond. At those time controls, it is not really an issue. 
If you want to play against other smart board users and level it out - there is a ChessUp club.

https://playchessup.com/pages/chessup-2-support^setup videos there. There is a QR code in the manual in the box that links to that page.
support.chessup2.com is that same page.
We do video manuals because the UI changes over time.