Customer Reviews

Metal Board Chinese Checkers, Checkers and Chess

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Purchased this to introduce kids to an inexpensive version of chess, chinese checkers and regular checkers. Pieces are very small and inexpensively made as you might expect but what REALLy annoyed me was having 3 rooks and only 1 bishop on the chess game. All pieces are very small, tend to shift easily and subject to quality control issues that render the game plain annoying. Spend a few more bucks and buy something with the proper pieces.

It's hard to tell from the picture, but the marbles aren't solid colors. Instead, they're clear with a wavy piece of color running through them. That makes it very hard to see the color against the various parts of the Chinese Checkers board. Also, the spots for the board are very shallow, so any bump of the board will send the pieces rolling into new spots.

The checkers board is strangely colored and hard on the eyes. The pieces also feel extremely cheap, making it much less pleasant to play on than a separate checkers set you can buy for a few bucks.

I THOUGHT I WAS GETTING A GOOD PRICE ON THIS ITEM .. BUT FOUND THE SAME ITEM AT WAL-MART FOR $3.98 AND DIDN'T HAVE TO PAY SHIPPING. THIS ITEM IS HIGHLY OVER PRICED.

I may have actually reviewed this elsewhere on amazon and said something to the effect, "well, you buy it knowing it's going to be cheap, so I don't know why people are complaining."

If I said something like that, I've changed my mind.

I'm pretty open minded when it comes to quality of a product of this nature. It's pieces are GOING to be plastic, and chances are, cheap. But you really don't know how cheap they can be until you've seen this set. Basically, it looks like these pieces were all made to be magnetic... and then someone cut the budget, tore the magnets out, and still left the holes where the magnets should have gone. I kid you not.

Now, I was looking at it to begin with and thinking... "well... it'd do in a pinch" ... but that's called sunny optimism. Looking at them again, I'm not sure how anyone with grown-up hands could possibly play these games at all. The pieces are just too cheap. It's not what they look like, it's that they're so light and so badly made, that even if you didn't care if they looked like garbage (I didn't, really), they are pretty much un-usable.

I you're buying it for very, very careful and patient little kids, as a very, very cheap thrill... okay, maybe if they're SUPER patient, and their hands are very little, and they really ARE very careful... they MIGHT be able to actually play the games included. But probably not the rest of us. And the board I was silver and blue checkered. I've seen a lot of boards in my time, but this one really does look bad. They'd shaded the squares in a vain attempt to make it look cool or something, but it just looks really, really stupid. And the pieces are way, way too small for the chess board. And the marbles will just roll all over the place.

That being said, I'm not sure why anyone actually would want this set. Seriously, you'd be better off getting one of those standard black and red cheap sets they sell in stores with the plastic pieces. You won't get Chinese checkers, but you'll at least get TWO games (chess and checkers) that you actually CAN play. And I would have definitely been satisfied with that product for a "cheap game set".

The board is very sturdy and marbles are nicely colored. The marbles do roll off the board when knocked so it does not work well for clumbsy fingers.

Pieces were tiny and junky. We couldn't tell the chess pieces apart from each other. The balls for the Chinese Checkers were so light, feather weight plastic. I guess you get what you pay for.

The tin box does NOT close good, so you might want to keep the bottom cardboard part to keep the tin box close.

We bought this at target for $5 and we took it back. The chess pieces are microscopic and are painful on your eyes to distinguish from a standard playing eye to hand distance. The rest would be okay for the price, but extremely low quality. Avoid this set.