| Blindfold Chess is a way to play chess, whereby players don't have the physical pieces in sight, and the moves are communicated audibly, or otherwise, to the players. To play you must have the "View/Moves List" option selected. An invisible piece is moved by simply picking it up and moving it to its destination. You can see the computer's response in the moves list.
To make it easier, especially for beginners, you may view parts of, or the entire piece set, as anonymous markers. You do this by selecting "Switch Piece Set" one or several times, according to the following list.
Show position of...
1: white pawns only.
2: black pawns only.
3: both white and black pawns.
4: all white pieces and pawns.
5: all black pieces and pawns.
6: all pieces on the board.
The seventh switch will show the regular pieces, and the next switch will again show an empty board. Having the position of the pieces in sight makes it considerably easier. To make the pawn positions visible is, for the unexperienced blindfold player, probably good enough. Nevertheless, should you want to check what piece it is, right-click and choose "Properties".
Preferably, do not have the "View/Options/Authoring/Verbose notation in moves list" notched, although, in this case, the pieces names are altered to "X1", etc., in order to prevent the player from reconstructing the position from the moves list.
In the variant with uncheckered board, preferably, you should have the option "View/Status Bar" selected, and the "View/Options/Show Positions" notched. By placing the cursor on a square you will see whether an invisible piece is positioned on it, or whether it's an empty square, in which case the square's coordinates are shown. In case of a piece, you can check its colour by right-clicking. The "Properties" and the "Show" right-click menues will give you information about square coordinates, etc. The simplest way to find your way on the uncheckered board is simply to grab the piece. Its destination squares will be highlighted if its a friendly piece. |
