I’m still pretty new to chess, and whenever I play with my kids, I keep overlooking things and making blunders. But after watching some chess streams, I realized that even International Masters—people who have been playing chess for almost their entire lives—still blunder. So I’d been dreaming about a visualizer like this for a long time.

The idea sounds simple: visually show the attacks of every piece. But even my earliest attempts revealed a problem. Once all those little lines started crossing and overlapping, it became impossible to make out what was happening on the board. The whole picture was simply unreadable.

So I started experimenting with displaying attacks as rays and coloring the backgrounds of the squares according to each side’s attack strength—a kind of heatmap. Eventually, I found a setup where the visualization actually helps instead of getting in the way. It turned out that combining attack rays with square highlighting works pretty well, as long as the attack colors of both sides are blended in the right way.

Getting the geometry and colors of the attacks right required a lot of thought, experimentation, and fine-tuning. But when I play using the visualizer, it has helped me reduce the number of blunders to almost zero.

Try experimenting with your own way of seeing the board—maybe you can achieve similar results too. And if you discover a better way to visualize a position, please share your findings—it could help other players as well. The project is open source and released under the MIT License.

Play without blunders, and have fun! :)

Try it online: chess-visualizer.ivan-a87.workers.dev

Chess Visualizer

#chess #visualization #education #boardgames

#chess #visualization #education #boardgames