"D7." Yang Yu gnawed on a chicken leg, calling out the coordinates indistinctly.
"F4." Yuan Tian was wearing plastic gloves as he peeled and ate crayfish.
"C2," Yang Yu said.
"Q14," Yuan Tian replied.
"Hm? Changing battlefields?" Yang Yu blinked and thought for a moment. "N4!"
Song He and Xiang Xiaotong suddenly appeared beside the dining table, staring at the two children with strange expressions.
"Good afternoon, Principal!" Yuan Tian and Yang Yu looked up in surprise and said in unison.
"What are you two doing?" Song He asked meaningfully.
"We... we're gnawing on chicken legs." Yang Yu stared blankly at him. "Principal, would you like one?"
"I'm talking about the letters and numbers you just called out." Song He smiled. "Playing blind chess, are you?"
The two children nodded together.
Xiang Xiaotong was astonished. "You two can play blind chess? Gomoku or Weiqi?"
"We were playing Weiqi just now," Yuan Tian explained.
Song He and Xiang Xiaotong quickly exchanged a glance, intense delight flashing through their eyes!
Blind chess meant playing without a physical board. The two players imagined a huge chessboard in their minds and played in empty space by calling out the positions of the pieces.
A Weiqi board had nineteen rows and nineteen columns. The top and bottom were labeled A through T, while the left side ran from 19 to 1 from top to bottom, and the right side from 1 to 19. Each position was represented by a letter and a number, which was a relatively common method for recording blind-chess positions.
There were 361 intersections in total. Every one had to appear clearly in both players' imaginations, and each piece had to land steadily on its intersection and remain there for the game to continue.
The slightest mistake would throw the entire game