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Comment by psudmant | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has played a lot of chess I don't find this useful. I'm surprised how many people have positive responses to this.

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Consider for a moment the billions of people who have not played a lot of chess. Seems like a cool teaching aid for youngsters especially.

Does it take anyone longer than a game or two to remember the rules of chess? I even taught chess to adults as a child and they caught on within a few moves. Which I guess explains why it remains more popular than FOTM overcomplicated board game #5000. It's not difficult to memorize. IMO this is a solution to a nonexistent problem.

Knowing the rules and 'seeing' the ways that pieces can move are different things. I could see this being helpful to someone who has a working knowledge of the ways pieces can move, but hasn't yet built their skill of visualization thereof.

So we should delay the development of their visualization skill, because otherwise visualization is useless in chess? This works literally against what chess is about and materializes the least complex aspect of the game into a visual noise all over the board.

Except this doesn't help you visualize it either. I can understand this argument for online boards that, when you click on a piece, highlight all the legal moves. This set doesn't do that, it basically just reminds you how the pieces move.

I don't think anyone that actually plays or teaches chess thinks this is a good set design. Honestly amazed by how many people called this clever. I also find it weird that OP claims it makes the board "easier to probe", when it does the exact opposite. This is a textbook example of making up a problem, rather than a solution.

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