For a chess company as innovative as Millennium, this is a painfully poor design. The cable management coming out of the drawer is clumsy, the drawer is almost impossible to open when closed (how about some kind of a handle or u shaped cut out you can stick your fingers in?) I have to take the board off to wedge my fingers in the drawer to yank it open in order to store the pieces. If the entire point of the product is that its' a drawer to hide stuff, at least make the drawer easy to open? Sheesh.
Also, the components barely fit inside. I now have marks on top of the Chess Link where the drawer rubs against it.
As for the system for holding the board onto the top of the drawer unit: there isn't one. Sure, Millennium provides you with a paper template and some foam stickers, but then the board free floats up on top of the drawer unit.
Of course, I could be missing something in assembling this, which would not surprise me because the directions are all but completely useless. In the 21st Century there is no longer any excuse for English language directions from a German company to be so terrible. A bit more thought, please.
At the end of the day, it does a barely sufficient job in that it does hide all the components and the on/off switch works well, and I really have no other choice but to keep this if I want to hide all the external components I need to use this board.
I am going to have to hack a way to keep this board in place, probably with velcro dots or something.
This is NO reflection on Chess House. Their service remains second to none, really superb service, and I have no doubt that if I sent this back it would be painless.
I have two Millennium boards: The King Performance and this Exclusive. I love, love, love playing chess on both of them. But this drawer product needed more time on the development board.
I give this two stars. And that's generous. If you have the Exclusive chess board and are tired of all the accessories lying around, this unit may be for you, but count on having to modify it to your liking and living with the annoying prospect of yanking the drawer unit open every time you need to store the pieces or set up the board.