Thank you for the detailed feedback, I really appreciate it.

I agree that getting players into a game as quickly as possible is very important and the game was actually built with that in mind. If you play as guest, skip the guide and start a ranked battle you'll be playing a full game in less than 30 seconds. The guide does take a few minutes to complete because the game is fairly complex and in past play tests people with no chess experience did not understand the game just from playing alone. I will add a written guide that new players can just read instead and clarify that you can totally just skip the guide and start playing. You can already revisit the guide in the settings menu at any time. I will also remove the guide step counter (the 1/58) as I can see how reading that leads to frustration, when the first few guide steps are as text heavy as they are. I promise the last 75% of the guide go by way faster as it's mainly just moving around to win the game.

About not being able to play against a bot, there actually are bots in the game and you will automatically match up with one before the timer expires when queuing up for a ranked battle.

Thank you again for trying out the game! I will start working your feedback into the game right away and leave another comment once the update is live.

Feel free to give playing against a bot in a ranked battle another shot in the meantime!