Today’s chess machines have come a long way from electronic chess of old. They have strong but variable strength and are useful in personal game improvement. There’s no such thing as chess computers that are too strong for any player. The software for any machine has settings from ‘novice’ to ‘expert’ so that the computer chess game is enjoyable and meaningful to any player. Sound67: Actually, many of the later, better chess computers DID resign in a hopeless position or when they saw a mate against them coming. Even my 1983 Chess Challenger Sensory 9 had a "resign mode" (which could be disabled though). “ All this is housed in a lightweight design that you can take with you. Maybe you want to play on veranda and take in the sun. To start with I REALLY like playing on it. The pieces have a nice feel and I have experienced no glitches except it didn’t seem to recognize enpassant when it came up in one of my games. I will have to ask DGT about that if it happens again. No connectivity options at all. It's a very closed system: No upgrades, no online play, no PGN export.

Other, more expensive, boards by DGT and I believe also boards by Millenium have chipped pieces. If you insist on easily setting up custom positions, it might be worthwhile investigating those. Some have argued, with reason, for the money DGT are asking that the Centaur should have had more options. The option to enable/disable auto resign and offer draw would indeed have been a nice addition.That advertisements said it learns in just one game but it crushed me for about the first 3 or 4 games and then started to even out. I won the last two. I own one and had the pleasure of meeting with the CEO of DGT. He took me through the product, it’s features, and some of the engineering elements. As someone with quite a few chess computers, I was pleased to see a lot of improvements made. The board is thin and lightweight. Those cups underneath actually work as a sort of prism to help illuminate the board when moves are made. The extra queens is a nice touch. None of my electronic sets included those. Compared to my Grandmaster, the piece size slightly smaller but still satisfying to move. I have been on the monitor but with the time I get tired and think that it is better to alternate between a board with real figures and the monitor.

The only thing that worries me is that it seems to be fragile. The board is very lightweight plastic with no bottom on the board leaving the lights and electronics fairly exposed. The bottom of the chess pieces have a thin foil coating under which you can see the electronics. They have no real protection. I feel like the board in particular would not survive even one small drop. I could be wrong but I am not going to experiment. LOL A side note is that when setting up a position, if you want castling rights, you must NOT clear the board first, then place your king and rooks on the board. The computer will count them as having moved and will not allow castling. Therefore, if you want castling rights, you must set up a New Game position, enter set up mode and leave your kings and rooks alone that you want castling rights for. This applies to all stand-alone chess computers I have used.I tried going into Set-Up mode hoping that the computer would use the position I had onscreen as the selected position to set up. Again the Centaur had the final position displayed in Set-Up mode.

Two adaptive difficulties: friendly and challenging, at which I win 99% and <50% respectively. Adaptive as in it determines your strength from your play and adjusts it's own strength accordingly, making it an ideal opponent for almost everyone. This means that you'll have to setup a custom position via it's menu and buttons which IMO is, like I mentioned earlier, very tedious. I've done it once myself and decided there are better ways to do this (ie. Lichess, Lucas Chess). I have also just bought the DGT Centaur. I have a collection of chess computers ranging in age and strength - nearly all attained via charity shops.The most innovative Chess Computer that automatically adapts itself to your playing strength. It gives you a fair chance to win, to learn and, most importantly to have fun! No individual piece recognition, so setting up a custom game position via the menu/GUI is very tedious. There are many ways to learn to play chess ... and not just on the monitor because nowadays we have it ... and everybody can have different habits of how to learn something ... Adaptive intelligent Chess Computer automatically adjusts itself to your playing strenght. It gives you a fair chance to win, to learn and, most importantly to have fun!