I have always been a fan of playing Chess OTB, but it is so hard to do so especially with the pandemic. I have been looking at all DGT boards and also came across the Square Off Pro. It seems really cool & the fact that it can be connected with Lichess makes it seem like an excellent choice. However, a lot of new technology seems to be frustrating and I am certainly not one that has the patience of an early adopter.
I was wondering if anyone here has tried Square Off Pro with Lichess and what their experience has been. I would love to play 20+0 and higher games and a board like that seems perfect for it!
I prefer triangles but squares are okay.
Hi,
I recently bought a square off pro and so far I am happy with the experience. Hardware is top in my opinion, however, the app itself still needs a bit of work. They push an update to the app every month or so, and the match making with lichess has gotten better (before it took quite long to get a match) but once a match is found everything works. However there are still a few bugs that one needs to be aware of, some of which don’t bother me too much right now but hopefully they will be fix. For many games on lichess the app ifrom square off will make a sound that the game is won/lost, but never show the “you won” screen. Everything is saved on lichess though, so not a huge issue for me.
For match making, you can play against a random opponent, however for some reason the choice of time formats and increment is limited. It also differs for rated vs. non-rated. You can also play against a particular player on lichess, which works perfectly fine for me. I play a game against my dad like this every night. You can also accept lichess challenges within the square off app. However, I did not manage yet to play against a lichess bot.
TLDR: app still has many bugs and quirks that will hopefully be fixed with updates. They are inconvenient but I find it workable for the things that I need right now (play random opponents now and then and my friends)
I leave it at that for now, let me know if you have other questions and I try to reply in more detail
Cheers!
For anyone stumbling over this thread, here I took screenshots of all options available for lichess with the latest version of the iPhone app:
imgur.com/a/woNcFKQIn addition you can challenge specific players, there the allowed times are different and you can select almost anything you could want that is above 10min with all sorts of increment choices (don’t ask me why this is not possible for match making). No option for blitz or bullet etc
