I built a free tool to learn Blindfold Chess and improve visualization

The Real Problem with Blindfold Training

Every chess player has tried it at least once: close your eyes, ask a friend to call out moves, and try to keep the position in your head. It goes well for about six moves. Then a knight lands on a square you thought was empty, your mental board collapses, and you give up convinced that blindfold chess is for GMs and circus acts.

The actual issue isn't memory. It's that visualization is built on primitives most players never drill: square colors, diagonals, knight paths, piece coordination on an empty board. You can't hold a full position in your head if you still need half a second to remember whether e4 is a light or dark square.

A Workflow Based on Progressive Levels

DarkSquares is built around the idea that blindfold play is the end of a ladder, not a shortcut. The flow has four stages:

Step 1: Drill the Primitives
Before touching a real position, you train the sub-skills: square color recognition, coordinate recall, diagonal mapping, knight movement on an empty board, bishop mazes. Short exercises, seconds each. The goal is automaticity, not speed-run scores.

Step 2: Climb the Visualization Levels
Seven progressive levels, from a fully visible board down to a completely blank one. In between you get silhouettes (shapes only, no piece type), disks (piece color only, no identity), and several hybrid modes. Each level forces your brain to fill in more from memory.

Step 3: Train on Real Positions
Puzzles, famous games, and endgames, played at whichever level you're comfortable with. This is the bridge between drills and actual chess. You keep the rules, the tactics, the calculation; you just remove visual crutches one at a time.

Step 4: Play Full Games Blindfold
Against 8 AI difficulties, at any visualization level. Level 7 is the real thing: no board, moves announced, you play in coordinate notation. It stops feeling impossible once the primitives are automatic.

What Actually Surprised Me

I expected the hard part to be holding the whole position. It wasn't. The thing that kept breaking my visualization was knight moves, specifically, tracking a knight across two or three hops on a board I couldn't see. Drilling the knight-maze exercise for a few days did more for my blindfold play than any amount of "just try harder" sessions.

The other surprise: square colors. I thought I knew them. I didn't. I knew the ones I use often and hesitated on the rest. A week of 30-second color drills removed an entire category of blindfold mistakes I didn't know I was making.

Try It

DarkSquares is at darksquares.net, with a free tier that covers unlimited exercises and the first three levels. Web, iOS, Android, progress syncs across all three.