Excalibur Phantom Force Review

I finally got my hands on the Excalibur Phantom Force chess computer. First thing I did was grab an AC power adapter and head over to a local coffee shop to test the unit out. I got several comments on the Phantom Force while I was there dinkin around with it, like when I made it set itself up for a game, this girl walked up, stared at it for a few minutes then said "that thing scares me!" then walked off. While I was there that chess computer started several conversations for me, people were very interested. I was a little disappointed however in 4 things, the Phantom Force cannot set itself up unless each piece is placed off to the side in it's own capture space. It cannot move more than one piece at once, so if you don't mind waiting over 5 minutes for it to set itself up then maybe you ought to do the setting up yourself! The unseen hand beneath the board surface makes a fair bit of noise. And last and most importantly, the Excalibur Phantom Force does not feature auto sensory, that may sound contradictory with the feature that it moves itself, but it actually doesn't recognise each piece's characteristics, this also means that like other chess computers you have to push on your piece on the square from where you are moving it and push on the square you move it to. So if you place the queen in rank with the pawns it will move like a pawn.
But I think the good outweighs the bad. All the above "bad things" I said about the Phantom Force are side effects in this computer because it is the only one of it's kind, and it is infinitely ahead of most chess computers. the one reason most people would rather use touch screen LCD units is because they move their own pieces, now you can play with a real board and real pieces without ever having to touch your opponents piece. The takeback move feature is simply awesome! it appears to me you can takeback a whole game of moves. Although I only tested it up to five moves. What makes this really cool is that it does all the work for you, and if you aren't taking notes you might forget 3 moves ago where you or the computer was, but the computer does it all for you. This is also great for re-working chess puzzles. The talking feature is about the same quality as the Ivan II I never really did care for the talking/noisy feature in chess computers but I did bear with it for this review. I can tell you straight off that most adults will shut off the sound. But it is a great coaching tool for beginners. It tells you when you are in checkmate, alerts you to dangerous positions (extremely annoying to advanced players) and illegal moves. To see the Phantom Force castle and open with it's knights is pretty cool, to open with knights it just moves the pawn in front of it out of the way, then it takes out the knight and puts back the pawn. Very similar for castling. In a nutshell the Excalibur Phantom Force chess computer is always going to be a joy to play against, because it does most of the work, it will amaze everyone watching and it will be an excellent analysis tools for working out chess problems.

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