I’ve just published a blindfold chess app on playblindfoldchess.com!
This is a simple app for playing pure blindfold chess. No boards, no hints, no undo’s. I was inspired to create this by my own interest in playing blindfold chess myself and improving my capability in doing so, and by the fact that there doesn’t seem to be an app out there that lets you play true blindfold chess. I plan on expanding this to an Android app, then an Android smartwatch app.
The section below dives a bit into my own history with chess, and the section below that shows the first game I won against the AI in easy mode.
My Experience with Chess
I learned the rules of chess from my dad when I was a young child. We’d play games occasionally during the summer while working on chores in our backyard. I hadn’t played much since then until September of 2022, when I picked it up again and started studying some basic openings and tactics.
In early 2023, I was playing around with ChatGPT for the second or third time when I challenged it to a game of chess. It agreed to play and made it’s first move “e4.” It didn’t render a board, it just said “e4.” I was pleasantly surprised at the pithiness of that response and decided to take the opportunity to try blindfold chess for the first time. I fared better than expected, likely due to my almost daily chess games during the prior months. I wasn’t able to fully visualize the board and the pieces, but I was able to visualize spots on the board and remember piece positions in relation to each other. I ended the game after becoming suspicious of some of the moves ChatGPT made. I wasn’t sure if it was making illegal moves, since it wasn’t actually a chess engine, or if I was just failing to visualize the game properly. I looked through the moves afterward on a real chessboard and realized that ChatGPT actually did make some illegal moves.
I was hooked on the idea of improving at blindfold chess, so I created my own Chess AI and made a basic interface to let me input moves using chess notation, like “e4” or “Bxd3”. The engine was slow and the interface was clumsy, but it got the job done. After a few months of playing, I stopped maintaining the app and the website it was hosted on and didn’t give it much attention afterward.
Recently, I had the idea of making a better version of that app, one which I could turn into an Android app and an Android smartwatch app. I got to work on making a smooth, minimalist interface for the game and decided to use Stockfish, an open source chess AI engine, to make the gameplay faster and smoother, purely as a side-project. After a few months of off-and-on development, I’ve completed the first iteration of the project and have published it on playbildfoldchess.com.
Gameplay
My app records the list of moves as the game progresses and lets you copy the list once the game is complete. Here’s the first game I won against the AI in easy mode, visualized on chess.com:
