An electronic chess board is awesome for a 3.5 year old. I would just recommend avoiding square off.

Here is a feature list of what differentiates choices out there:

- built in Ai (runs without requiring an app)
- Bluetooth boards (run with an app and play on lichess and chess.com)
- robotic boards (moves pieces for you)
- Ai assistance boards (touch a piece and see Ai based move strengths)

And a variety of build quality and sizes. Also a variety of how they track the pieces. Some have absolute piece ID (RFID) and some rely on tracking moves from start.

What is the most important feature for you? And do you want something for you also, or just the kid?

For instance if you don’t care about online play, or you do, etc.

I guess I'd say I'm not too worried about cost, just looking for the best.

Features that would be great:
- ease of use for a young kid
- if it can teach him better than me, in an easy to understand manner, great
- i'd probably play it too, but not that important for me, just a nice to have
- one device would be good. i wouldn't want my kid to need to connect it to a phone, to then need to see where the opponent's piece needs to be moved to.

this is all new to me, but he has a fascination with chess and he understands it, so i want to help grow his excitement and improve his game.

thanks!

Gotcha.

The standalone requirement narrows down the field a bunch.

He would probably enjoy ChessUp - only catch there is he needs to know how to set up the board to start a game (if he mixes a knight and a bishop, it will mistake the pieces for the rest of that game)

If you want way more info on all models out there and such - happy to share over email. Just PM me.

There is a lot of $60-$100 dollar Chinese stuff as well on Amazon, but you are getting what you pay for with those.