Drueke 877.10 Magnetic Chess Set
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List Price: Our Price: $22.49 You Save: $0.51 (2%) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Category: Sports See more product details |
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Description of Drueke 877.10 Magnetic Chess Set
This easy-to-transport set allows you to play chess anywhere, anytime. The Magnetic Chess Set is perfect for long car and plane rides. The plastic chessmen are equipped with a magnetic bottom so they won't move or slide when you encounter some rough terrain. The magnetic set is also perfect for when time is short. Squeeze in as much chess as you can during break, place it away when time is up, and then return to your game with the pieces exactly where you left them during your next free moment.Sports reviews of Drueke 877.10 Magnetic Chess Set
Customer Review: GREAT PORTABLE CHESS SET
Sport shop rating: 5 Stars
Excellent sized and constructed chess set. It is a great chess set for travel or for regular use. The bishops look like pawns and can be capped with colored tape or paint to make them stand out.Customer Review: Great travel chess set
Sport shop rating: 5 Stars
Well made little set with plenty of holding power. Won't find many chess sets better than this one. Cannot recommend highly enough.Customer Review: Good but Could Be Improved
Sport shop rating: 4 Stars
This chess board is good but I do not understand why the manufacturer does not take some minor steps that could improve the product significantly. To sum:
1) Everyone is correct that the magnets fall off the pieces way too easily. My cat separated them with his claws! This is actually a big problem because losing just one magnet could defeat the point of the entire board (can't really use it as a travel chess set when a piece keeps moving). Furthermore, a piece cannot stand on its own without the magnet. After my cat nearly made me lose a magnet, I spent ten minutes gluing the magnets and the pieces together. I don't know why the manufacturer cannot do the same.
2) All the pieces are exactly the same height. I have never before seen a chess board where even the King and the Queen are exactly as tall as pawns. It is especially difficult to distinguish a bishop from the pawn. This makes it more difficult to play and is just annoying.
3) The price tag seems unwarranted. This is a small board and the chessmen are made out of cheap, low quality plastic. The board is just thin lawyer of untempered iron that gets easily scratched. Magnets are soft and tends to crumble around the edges. The only part of the material that I see costing anything is the tin box. $22 is a bit much for the level of quality.
On the other hand, one really good quality of this board is that you don't have to clean the board to store. Other magnetic chess sets usually fold into a box and so in order to store, you have to clean out the chessmen from the board. This one, you can just close the lid and pieces will stay where they are.
In short, this is a decent magnetic chess board but I wonder if I could have gotten something else that is better. However, because you can store it without having to clean out the pieces, this board would be better for those who need to store away their games frequently (me for example--my cats won't leave an open chess board alone).
Customer Review: Convenient, portable Chess Set for people on the go
Sport shop rating: 4 Stars
Overall, I like this chess set. It is a great value for the price, and fulfills it's purpose, to play chess on travel or on the go. For example, my son and I played chess at a theme park while waiting in line for rides, and my son uses it on the school bus.
Positives: Case is well-built, seems strong enough, my son threw the closed set to me 15 feet away, landing it on the pavement, and the case was not damaged. Pieces really stick to the board, and are short enough you can close the box, put it in your backback, get it out later, and your game is intact. It's big enough to see and move the pieces (I've had tiny sets). But it's small enough to fit in a backback and to hold easily with one hand while moving pieces with the other. Case is attractive.
Negatives: Case and pieces are plastic, and on the aforementioned throw, one of tiny tabs marking a rook broke off. All the pieces are the same size, and the bishops look too much like pawns -- but people have fixed that by putting a dot of paint on the Bishop heads, and we will do that soon.
Biggest negative: The paint is wearing off the black squares, and we've only had this a month or two. The problem is the magnets are strong, and if you slide your pieces, the friction is like sanding the board. You really need to pick up the pieces to move them, but then you have to be careful because if you go too close you can magnetically pull other pieces off the board. I don't know if this is peculiar to our board, because it seems a thin coat of clear finish would have solved this problem. We might contact the company to see if we can get a replacement, but it looks like it would be easy enough to repaint if we had to.
But the paint doesn't come off MUCH, so it's still easy to tell which square is which.
Customer Review: Great for the price and the use it will recieve
Sport shop rating: 4 Stars
This Chess set was the perfect answer to a dillemma. My boyfriend is serving our country over in Iraq. We both play chess and we were both going to miss being able to play very much. Right before he left, he mailed me a package with a chess set he had picked out for me. And enclosed "the rules" these rules simple put it that each person could make a move over IM, Letter Or email and could only make one turn per contact. This sounded great to me, but he did not have a chess set. Since they move him around quite a bit a regular chess set would have been cumbersome and setting it up and taking it down would have been problematic as well.
I found this chess set on Amazon and although it has a couple of minor things that i would have liked to be better, it is an excellent overall product.
The Queen and King could be a tad easier to distinguish, but despite that, the magnets could hold the peices in place even shaking it around, the lid stayed on securely, and provided the perfect answer to our dillema.
Now My boyfriend can still play chess with me from the otherside of the planet, in a war zone. Having this little chess set is allowing me to somehow feel a little closer and to help him keep his spirits up. This little chess set is in an indirect way supporting our troops.
Thanks for such a space saving, Portable product!