Blindfold Chess - DarkSquares

Play a full game of chess out loud, without ever seeing the board. DarkSquares teaches you blindfold chess step by step, so you can hold a whole position in your mind, track every piece from memory and play your moves by voice.

No pieces, no problem. Whether you are a beginner who can barely picture one square or a club player looking to sharpen your calculation, this is chess visualization training that actually sticks.

Learn blindfold chess from scratch
Blindfold chess means playing without seeing the pieces. You keep the position in your head, move after move. It sounds impossible, but it is the single best way to build chess vision. Every strong player calculates by picturing positions that are not on the board yet. DarkSquares turns that skill into daily practice you can actually stick with.

A guided journey
- Start at your very first square and build up to full blindfold chess
- Earn Bronze, Silver and Gold as your inner board gets stronger
- Clear, bite-sized steps so you are never lost
- Track your level, your streak and your personal bests as you go

Sixteen visualization drills
- Square colors: instantly tell light squares from dark
- Chess coordinates: name any square without counting
- Quadrants and diagonals: lock the grid into memory
- Knight moves and knight mazes: master the hardest piece to picture
- Bishop paths, spotting attacks and piece relationships
- Chess memory drills and position reconstruction: hold whole positions in your head
- Blindfold puzzles and endgame drills

Play blindfold against the AI
- Choose how much you see: full board, faded disks, or a completely blank board
- Eight engine levels, from your first game to club strength
- Type your moves, or speak them out loud
- On-device speech recognition, so your voice never leaves your phone

Play chess by voice
Say your move and it is played. DarkSquares announces the replies out loud, so you can play a whole game hands-free with your eyes closed, on a walk or on your commute. Voice chess runs entirely offline, and nothing is sent to a server.

Blindfold chess puzzles
- Follow a few moves in your head, then find the tactic
- Come back to your recent puzzles, solved or missed, in your puzzle history
- Tactics matched to your level, with the solution replayed step by step

Replay 120 famous games
- Walk through Morphy, Fischer, Kasparov and more, move by move
- Rebuild the legendary games entirely in your mind
- The way masters trained their memory long before engines existed

Play real opponents online
- Connect your free Lichess account and play blindfold chess online
- Resume a game already in progress, right where you left off

Why train chess visualization
Visualization is the skill behind every deep calculation. Players who see the board clearly blunder less, spot tactics earlier and read endgames faster. Blindfold training builds working memory, concentration and pattern recognition, and all of it translates directly into better results over the board.

It also works the other way around. If you already play well but lose the thread three moves deep, blindfold drills are the fastest way to find out exactly where your inner board breaks down, and to repair it.

Free and offline
- Free to start, no account required
- Works fully offline, so you can train anywhere
- No ads interrupting a drill

Blindfold chess is the ultimate test of chess vision. Train it daily and your calculation, your memory and your confidence grow with it.

Train your mind to see the invisible board.

Recent changes:
- Visualization puzzles: a full-width board, and a clear "moves ago" tag on the position shown
- New "Last move only" setting: the move list shows just the last move during a game, as when playing blindfold
- Bishop Maze: the correction shows both shortest paths
- "Forgot password?" opens the reset form again
- "Rate DarkSquares" in More
- Lighter screens with less text, switches read out with their label