Doerdich: In your game you can see that he moved P e2-e4 after you moved your Knight to f6. You are right that if your first move was P d7-d6 and he moves to e5 with his Pawn you'll just take the Pawn and be in good shape. The thing is, you didn't move there. If your opponent is a beginner maybe he didn't know enough not to do it. If your opponent is a good player, maybe he was up to something or thought it would work against you in particular. If he's somewhere in between, who can say? Not every bad move in Dark Chess will be answered with the correct good move. Just wait until the game is over and replay the game with the lights on. You'll probably see a few moves that would be so ridiculous in a regular Chess game that you wonder how the players could be so stupid. Regular Chess openings work a lot different in Dark Chess. Some of the good openings in regular Chess work very poorly in Dark Chess because they require you to know where your opponent's pieces are to respond to them. Plus, some people like to bluff or just play bold and it can really frustrate a conservative player to have his pieces disappear without a trace.

I've played a few games of Dark Chess where my opponent and I played almost as if we could see the board and know where our opponent had moved. When you play a game like that, you'll know it's a good game. For some reason I don't seem to play as well any more, or my opponents have gotten better, or both. Still, it's a great game and I really wish I had a home version of it. Two monitors and one computer hooked to them would work just fine. Anybody got a Dark Chess program I can have or buy?