In my local town there was an electrical and electronics box pusher of televisions and stuff called Rumbelows, I would regularly walk past going to and from the bus station, one day walking past I saw this Star Chess in the window and it made me stop in my tracks, it looked so good I went straight in to enquire the price, and wow it was expensive at £60 but I wanted it so I started to save up and every time I walked past the shop I thought how good it would be to play with spaceships shooting each other.
It had a neat layout with a clear cover, on the outer left and right there are two controllers on a tethered cable with buttons for Activate, Clear, Warp, Report, Move, Fire and four way controls, on the middle left is the removable instruction command manual with plastic covers, and middle right the main fixed control box with speaker and switches for sound, power and a reset button, all very neat.
Star Chess can be played like real chess or in Star Chess mode where the two players can move their ships like chess but also you can fire missiles at the other player, you can get a damage report or activate shields, you can even warp jump to a random place on the board.
I all sounded good so after connecting everything to the main TV and turning it on, it looked okay but everything looked a bit static on screen, the ships didn’t fly around they just disappeared from one square and reappeared on another very slowly and when shooting your opponent the laser or rocked “dot” moved very slow from one square to another, even playing normal chess by not using the warp, report and fire buttons on the controller was slow, and been only two player if you can’t get anyone to play with you it’s not fun.
Star Chess ended up gathering dust very quickly, I don’t know what happened to it but as it got so little use back then it would have be in pristine condition today.