chess24 recently ended a sponsorship agreement with Regium Chess, which claims to be developing an automated electronic chessboard. We urge any potential backers of the related Kickstarter project to exercise extreme caution and first verify any claims made about a board which may well be “too good to be true”.

Regium approached chess24 late last year to ask if we were interested in developing an API for a chessboard they were working on. It seemed an extremely exciting project and later we came to an agreement to have Regium as one of the sponsors of the Banter Blitz Cup.

We yesterday ended that agreement.

Multiple red flags have been raised in recent days by an army of online investigators – from doubts about videos purporting to show a prototype in action, to copy/pasting from other websites and listing team members who may not exist. We sought urgent additional assurances from the company and asked to visit their headquarters and try out a prototype board. Those assurances were not provided.

We have contacted Kickstarter to share our suspicions and once again urge everyone to think very carefully before even considering going ahead with backing the project.