Katawa Shoujo Forums

every KS player know lilly is blind,so how she play chess with hanako?

In hanako path~[Nc5xb3]

well, Lilly has always been blind, so i guess she either touches the pieces and remembers where they are. Or hanako says something like 'piece' to 'location', and they play like that...I mean, she had to remember where everything is since birth, because she's blind ,so it's not THAT hard for her.

There are chess sets for blind people. Each piece has a peg extending from the bottom and each square has a hole for a piece. The player can touch the pieces and roam their hands across the board and the pegs will keep the pieces in place. The white and black pieces of the same type have minor differences that enable the player to tell which color they are. For example, the white knights have ears and the black knights do not. For the purposes of applying the touch/move rule, a piece is considered touched when the player lifts it out of the hole.

I used to play in chess tournaments, and had a blind player as my opponent several times. He usually beat me. (For those of you who are familiar with the USCF rating system, his rating was in the 1900s while mine was in the 1500s.)

mwalimu

very interesting, mwalimu

Blind players use a different kind of chessboard. Half of the squares on the board are raised (this corresponds to one of the colors) and pieces with a type of Braille are used. When a person with sight looks at the board, all the pieces appear flat. The blind person can then feel the chessboard and the pieces, using the height of the squares to differentiate them, and can feel the location of the pieces. Every year there is a tournament for blind chess-players in the US, the United States Blind Championship.

Blind people also have special clocks where they can feel how much time is left. The clock is normally between the two boards. The clock faces away from them so they can put their hand over the top and feel the time.



Here's a board like the one mwalimu mentioned.

that'll take either a LOT of touching, or very fast brains. gotta admire how they get around with different senses. i think we rely on our sight too much.

A friend of mine likes to play "blind chess," although he has someone else move the pieces for him when he does.

I personally don't like playing while blindfolded. I can't imagine how a blind person "visualizes" the board.

That's pretty cool, I can see playing chess blind, even with the modified boards being rather tedious at first, gotta take some skill.

mwalimu wrote:There are chess sets for blind people. Each piece has a peg extending from the bottom and each square has a hole for a piece. The player can touch the pieces and roam their hands across the board and the pegs will keep the pieces in place. The white and black pieces of the same type have minor differences that enable the player to tell which color they are. For example, the white knights have ears and the black knights do not. For the purposes of applying the touch/move rule, a piece is considered touched when the player lifts it out of the hole.

I used to play in chess tournaments, and had a blind player as my opponent several times. He usually beat me. (For those of you who are familiar with the USCF rating system, his rating was in the 1900s while mine was in the 1500s.)

mwalimu

I thought there would be something like this, I remember reading about blind chess once when I was younger. Very interesting, and with a thinking game like Chess I'd imagine taking the sight away from it all doesn't have as much of an impact as one would think. I mean, when I play chess I usually don't have to look at the board to know where my opponent's pieces are or where mines are. Though, I haven't played actual Chess with someone since like elementary school, so I've no idea if I can do the same thing now with my memory being worse and all.

If they didn't have a special playing board, there is enough trust between them for Hanako to announce her moves and give Lilly reminders of where pieces are when she asks.

It's incredibly ironic that a thread like this popped up the day after I had thought about including something like this in a fanfic I'm creating.

flurk wrote:that'll take either a LOT of touching, or very fast brains. gotta admire how they get around with different senses. i think we rely on our sight too much.

Nah, humans are just sight oriented, so most of the brain power dealing with senses is spent on sight; there's nothing wrong with that.

When we lose a sense, the other senses move in on the part of the brain that is now inactive (say the part that was used for sight), which makes them stronger.

I'd just assumed Lilly holds the board in her head in whatever way makes the most sense to her and has Hanako move the pieces for her. It would be very similar to the way you play three dimensional tic-tac-toe. (4x4x4 imaginary grid, you anounce piece placement by saying three numbers in order by x-axis, y-axis, then z-axis. Victory condition is achieving four-in-a-row in any direction along or through the cube.)

I doubt any of them is serious enough about the game to want to keep time, though. Besides, if they use a special board Hisao would have noticed its novelty (to him, anyway) in the demo and likely been able to infer that Hanako plays with Lilly without having needed to ask.

i actually thought that they'd play llike "B-8 to D-7" or something

vermithrx wrote: I doubt any of them is serious enough about the game to want to keep time, though. Besides, if they use a special board Hisao would have noticed its novelty (to him, anyway) in the demo and likely been able to infer that Hanako plays with Lilly without having needed to ask.

More probably they just have at least two boards - one usual board and second ehm... "brailled" board. Also playing blindfolded vs non-blindfolded is really not fair. More delicious copypaste:

..
The first time I played a blind person - I used their board. This was a big mistake as I found it difficult to concentrate with their hands constantly going all over the board. (I won but ....). So I strongly recommend you use a normal board in addition to their board.
...

ps. this game is surely increases awareness of several disabilities.

When my blind friend played in tournaments, he played with both his board and a regular board, and each player's moves were transferred to the other. That way he could touch his board and study the position while it was his opponent's turn to play. For casual play, they often used just his board.

It's quite possible Lilly uses a blind chess set when she plays chess. There's no reason why we would need to see it since we don't actually see her play, and Hasao and Hanako can play with a normal chess set.

And yes, there are some chess players who are able to remember, visualize the board and analyze the position just by having the moves announced, without any visual or tactile reference, i.e. "blindfold chess". Two such players could play a game with no chess set at all.