Blindfold Puzzles

Solving tactics with no board to look at

You get a position described rather than displayed, and you have to find the win: a mate, a fork, a pin, a skewer. This is where every foundation drill on the site converges. Coordinates, colours, piece paths, and recall all exist so that this becomes possible, and it is the closest thing to a real test of blindfold ability short of playing a full game.

The habit that separates people who improve here from people who stall is building the position before searching it. Place every piece, say the position back to yourself, and only then look for the tactic. Searching a half-built board produces answers that are brilliant and illegal. After that, the ordinary tactical discipline applies: checks first, then captures, then threats, because forcing moves shrink the tree and a smaller tree is far easier to hold in your head. Puzzle difficulty adapts to your rating while the blindfold level controls how many pieces are on the board, so you can raise one without raising the other. Fixed-difficulty versions live at advanced and expert. If holding the position is the bottleneck rather than the tactic, go back to position memory.