The Tempest Chess Clock Review
I’ll preface this post by a bold statement: chess clocks are generally ugly and impractical. There. I said it.
I mean, they still look like they came from the 90s. They haven’t kept up with technology, design, or UI trends at all. Their screens are pitiful compared to what we’ve all become used to: they aren’t big or bright or beautiful. They look like clunky kitchen egg timers you used to see in the bargain bin at Radio Shack (RIP).
And don’t get me started on the way to set up time control. You have to turn them upside down, to decode some hieroglyphs just to play even the simplest time controls, and you’d have to rub your belly while tapping your head for anything beyond basic 5+0
The Tempest chess clock promises to revolutionize the whole chess clock concept. Does it achieve it? Let’s see!
Concept
Right out of the box, the Tempest Chess Clock stands out. It abandons the traditional dual-button and dual-screen layout of most clocks, opting instead for a single, beautifully tactile rocker surface that responds to tilting rather than button clicking.
The top is smooth, the edges are clean, and it’s compact enough to sit comfortably between two players without taking up too much space. The design is intentionally minimal, avoiding clutter to focus purely on function and form. If Apple made a chess clock, it might look something like this.
The idea here is that your phone is part of the experience. You download the included app and just dock any phone (new or old) into the base. Perhaps the most revolutionary feature of the Tempest Chess Clock is how it works: you don’t click a button to end your turn. You tap your side of the clock, slightly tilting the docked device toward you, activating the timer switch with the gyroscope.
This means no noisy clicks. Personally, I’m not against a clicking sound that confirms the time has changed, but no hard parts means less breaking.
To block any notifications from coming in, I always put in on airplane mode. You could also dedicate some old or otherwise unused device because once you download the app, it never needs any connectivity to work. So it may be a perfect second life for an old phone.
Powerful Customization Options
Despite its clean look, the Tempest Chess Clock is anything but simple under the hood. It offers a fully customizable time system, with all the modes you’d expect and even some you wouldn’t including settings for games other than chess. It’s incredibly intuitive to set simple or complex time controls. They claim you will never need to read a user manual again, and I believe that’s true.
Included are simple settings for
- Blitz
- Rapid
- Classical
- Increment
- Delay
- Backgammon modes with scoreboards
- A very fun Chess960 (Freestyle chess) position generator
- Hourglass
- Sudden death
- Overtime (for Scrabble or wargame players)
- Byo-yomi (for Go players)
- 3 period tournament time controls
- Plus lots of customization options: change colors or clock styles, analog or digital, and even sounds when the time is low. Lots of customizability.
Since I play a lot with my girlfriend who is a couple hundred points below my rating, we play with time odds. Here, setting time odds is really easy and the app remembers your preferences. It even lets you flip those time odds with one touch which is appreciated when playing multiple games against the same person as the clock switches sides of the board.
This versatility makes the clock perfect not only for players, but also for clubs and tournament directors as there is now a tournament mode.
While it is best for casual players, some TDs do allow it because It shows that the airplane mode is activated, so no signal whatsoever can be used to influence the game, and the phone is docked in plain sight as a display only, not hiding in your or your opponent’s pocket. So if you still want to cheat, you’ll have to insert a probe where the sun doesn’t shine.
Where the traditional clocks struggle to let us customize the time controls, the Tempest chess clock stands out by its intuitiveness. For example, if you need to set complex time controls, you can simply use a sentence like “40 moves in 1 hour with 30 second increments, then the rest of the game in 30 minutes with 5 second delays.”, where words themselves are changeable by pressing on them. Not only does that make it simple to set such complex time controls, but you can also confirm at a glance what those settings are.
Also, you can easily adjust anything mid-game, that’s something I find next to impossible on my other clocks! You just press pause and adjust either player’s time in place. So simple. Note to other clock makers: why can’t you do that?
No more need for a tournament director to come examine the clock like some kind of old watchmaker just to add two minutes to a player’s time.
Maximising technology
Reinventing the chess clocks by using our phones opens up a lot of possibilities. A simple one is the option to add a vocal countdown in 8 languages. You choose when the countdown starts.
I put that feature on mute, but it really shows how the app lets you customize everything. Like, another cosmetic change you can modify is the color. Not only do you have a lot of choices, but each player gets to choose their colors. No compromise!
Your digital clock can also transform itself into an old school analog clock, but with new tricks like increments and delays, which regular analog clocks just can’t do.
An amazing feature here is that the clock scales to the time remaining: If you play an hour-long game and you are down to your last 4 minutes, you won’t have to strain to count the last 4 ‘minute marks’ between ‘11’ and ‘12’ since the clock face adapts to widen out smaller time durations, essentially using the entire clock circle for 12 minutes not 1 hour. For that to happens with a normal analog clock, it would have to be a Transformer.
For Chess960/Freestyle chess, the app can generate a position for you. If you would like to know more about the technical stuff, you can read the user manual here. Though, honestly it’s so intuitive you will likely never need to.
The Tempest Chess Clock at work
Now that all the theoretical aspects of the chess clock have been explained. It’s time to talk about its use in real life.
The velvet pouch is perfect for carrying it and protects the 620-gram base from everything else in my bag. No worries about traveling with this one.
The leather feels smooth and it looks nice. My iPhone 16 with its case fits inside without fear of breaking it. It holds really securely when docked. And can accommodate large or small phones, of varying thicknesses. My standard case is totally fine and fits nice and snug. But i’m pretty certain if you have one of those workman style otter cases, only those would be too thick to dock. Slim or medium cases should all be fine.
My biggest worry when I first saw the product would be that my phone would fly out of the dock during a passionate blitz time scramble. In fact, I’ve turn the whole thing upside down and the phone won’t budge. The phone is secure.
The strongest point of this object is how everything is extremely intuitive. I can’t emphasize that enough. It’s so simple that anyone can figure it out just by trying it.
EXCLUSIVE SCOOP!
A contact at Tempest told me they will soon be launching all-in-one devices which is why they refer to their dock-based clocks as “headless”.
So if you prefer to hold out for the same elegant interface and design but with screen and cpu included, you’ll just have to wait and see what those are like!
Conclusion
The Tempest Chess Clock doesn’t just bring the classic chess timer into the 21st century, it also keeps itself current with included app updates, ensuring your clock is always up to date.
For its price, is it really worth it? Sure, this Tempest Chess Clock doesn’t cost the 20$ cheap clock you can find on some dubious websites, but it is at the same time a beautifully designed object and a fully and easily customizable chess clock with software that gets updated pretty regularly.
I know that my review is overly positive, but it's my impression of this product for its price point. I really feel like it stand outs, especially with the uglier and harder-to-use chess clocks that cost a lot more. I can't believe that they are still out there for some reason.
This product is for chess players that want the feel of a tacticle chess clock (not just a touch screen app), the easy customization of every parameter and the sleek looks a nice chess setup deserves. For that price, you get the Tempest Chess Clock and its complementary software. Together, they tick all the boxes.
If I were making video OTB content, I would bring this clock and this app with me to all my shoots. Using a phone’s screen, everything is so bright and easy to see. I’ve seen some Streamers and Youtubers directly piping the display into their streams which is cool too.
I highly recommend the Tempest Chess Clock to anyone who enjoys playing over-the-board from time to time.
If you simply don’t want to dock your phone when you play chess, I get it, but then you’ll have to wait for whatever it is that Tempest is about to launch next, and I'll be sure to review that here if and when they do.
If you have any questions, ask below. I'll answer them.
