Blindfold Knight Game

A few enemy pieces show on a chessboard for three seconds, then hide. A pawn is called out, such as TAKE e5, and you hop your knight to it one knight's move at a time. Land on a square a hidden piece attacks and you are caught. It trains the skill blindfold chess players rely on, holding a position in your head, in rounds that take seconds.

How to play

1. Each round opens on the study board: your knight in yellow, the pawn to take in a yellow ring, and a few enemy pieces. Study them before they hide, or press READY when you have them.
2. The enemy pieces hide. The pawn stays, and the squares your knight can hop to are marked with a dot. Tap one to hop there, or type its name, such as e then 5. A square that is not a knight's move away does nothing.
3. Reach the pawn to take it. Land on a square a hidden piece stands on or attacks and you are caught: the board shows every piece and the line of attack, and you lose a life.
4. The pieces attack by the real rules of chess. A bishop, rook or queen is stopped by the first piece in its way, the pawn you are hunting included. The enemy's pawns attack diagonally down the board, towards you.
5. Later rounds call two or three pawns in a row. The next one is hunted from the square where you took the last, and every pawn still to come is on the board from the start.
6. PEEK shows the hidden pieces for one second, once a round, at a cost in points.

Round 1 hides two pieces for three seconds. Each round after it takes 0.15 seconds off the study, down to 1.5 seconds. Round 3 hides three pieces and adds pawns and the king, round 5 hides four and adds the queen, round 8 hides five and round 11 hides six. From round 4 a round calls two pawns, and from round 9 three. Every position is checked by code before it is dealt, so there is always a safe route to every pawn, and almost always a route just as short or shorter that a hidden piece guards.

On a keyboard, type a square's letter and number to hop there, press Backspace to clear a letter typed by mistake, Enter for READY and P for PEEK. Escape or Space pauses, and pausing hides the board, so it cannot buy a longer look.

Scoring

• A pawn taken scores 50 for each hop the shortest safe route needs, so a pawn three hops away scores 150 when you take it in three.
• Each hop more than the shortest safe route takes 25 off, down to 25 for the take.
• A peek takes 50 off the next take.
• Being caught scores nothing and costs a life.

Three lives lost end the game. Your five best scores are saved in this browser, with the round each game reached. In practice the pieces show until you press READY, being caught costs no life, and the game never ends on its own. End it from the pause screen. Practice games are not saved.

Why a knight

The knight jumps, so no piece can stand in its way, and the only thing to remember is which squares are attacked. That keeps the game about memory first and chess second. A player who has never played chess learns the knight's move and the square names in a few rounds, and the coordinates down the side of the board are always there to read.

Blindfold chess and memory

Blindfold players often describe a position as a few key pieces and the lines between them, rather than a picture of every square, and that is what a round asks you to hold. Our article on chess memorization covers how players remember openings, games and positions, and The Chess Memory Palace is a whole book on using a memory palace for chess.

Try our other free memory games, such as Vault Heist for observation or Metro Memory for remembering a route.