Blind Tic-Tac-Toe

Once I tried playing tic-tac-toe entirely in my head, just calling out the coordinates of the moves, and it was surprisingly doable. That gave me the idea of a tic-tac-toe game for blind players. The name Vamőba comes from “vak amőba”, Hungarian for blind tic-tac-toe.

The game is written in Imagine Logo and controlled with the numeric keypad. It reads everything aloud, so it is fully playable without looking at the screen, but the visuals were also designed with high contrast and large, clearly readable shapes so partially sighted players can follow the board, and the sounds can be turned off if you prefer to play quietly.

I published the game on vakinfo, a Hungarian site for the blind and visually impaired, where people actually played it. They also sent improvement ideas that I built into later versions. Some of the feedback I got: “I am partially sighted… not bad… the coloured squares helped”, “you are among the first in Hungary”. I owe a big thank you to Áron Ócsvári and the forum members for all their help. The game also earned 2nd place in the game software category of the Neumann János International Programming Competition in 2009.