I’ll be honest, regular 2D chess was already enough to sizzle my brain – but apparently that wasn’t difficult enough, as someone has created 5D chess.
Released last week by Conor Petersen and Thunkspace, 5D Chess claims to be “the first ever chess variant with spatial, temporal, and parallel dimensions”. There’s multiverse time travel, branching timelines, parallel dimensions – all something that makes it sound more suitable for Dr. Who than the average human.
Watch on YouTube
Early Steam and YouTube reviews have argued it’s actually closer to 4D chess, as the game features two physical and two temporal axes (“height” is not interactable). The explainer by MariAurum below finally helped me gain an understanding of the four axes: there’s your regular x and y physical axes (left, right, up and down on a traditional chess board), and then there’s your temporal axes, one that represents “time” (as in the past and future of a board), and the second representing parallel dimensions.
According to an explainer released by Thunkspace, pieces have specific rules for how they can move across time and space. Pawns, for instance, can only timeline hop “in the direction they can normally move on their board”, while rooks can “time travel to any board so long as the position they are currently occupying is not taken, but they cannot move while time travelling”. Simple.