I bought this game a few weeks ago with a friend and we jumped in without any prior knowledge about the game or how it worked. After about 3 hours we were finally starting to understand the basic principles and I have to say wow, it's an absolute blast to play. Many hours in now we've finally begun developing our own strategies and it's absolutely insane. I have to say that 5D Chess is one of the most creative and innovative games that I've played in recent memory and I highly recommend it.
'From my experience playing a few games on it against decently strong opponents has been that at high levels it becomes "Chess, but it's much much easier to checkmate, and 2~3 times a game some time travel shenanigans happen."<p>The main reason for that is time traveling and dimension hoping come at a tempo disadvantage. When you create a new timeline, you make 1 move, but give your opponent 2 moves. You used your turn in the present, and created a new board where it's their turn in the past.<p>Any time travel or dimension hops need to be worth twice as much, minimum, as a normal move to even consider making them.<p>It does have more depth than normal chess, but it's not infinity deep. I still love it. My biggest concern with high level chess matches is that many, many games end in draws. It feels like it's impossible to a draw a gam e in 5D chess' [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/hxqo6d/how_to_play_5d_chess_with_multiverse_time_travel/fz8nnqh/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/hxqo6d/how_to_play_5...</a>
I always thought a cool chess variant would be quantum chess where you can move a piece to more than one square and assign a probability to each position. Your opponent could do the same. But I never worked out how it could work from there.
Interesting. When I read "5d chess" I thought it would be a game where each
dimension is represented by a different chessboard giving you a different view
of the game. So for example, in the first dimension, the white king is in 1a
and a black rook is in 2b, whereas in the second dimension the white king is
still in 1a but the rook is in 1b, thus threatening the king. So everytime you
make a move in one board, the piece you moved moves on all boards, but in a
different, but relative, position. So the point of the game would be to make a
move in one board that crated an advantage on another board- if a piece is
captured in any board, it's captured on all boards and if a mate is threatened
in any board it's threatened on all boards (and yeah, that's totally cribbed
off the kernel trick in SVMs: map a lower-dimensional space onto a higher
dimensional space to find a separating hyperplane that doesn't exist in the
lower dimensional space). I guess that would get very hard to play very
quickly though, certainly for a full game on an 8 × 8 board, but it could
perhaps be played in end games like KRK or simplified chesses like hexapawn
etc.<p>Btw, for anyone who likes time travel paradoxes, do watch Dark. It's up there
with Primer, but does your head in more because of how many characters there
are.
The video at the end reminded me of "Imagining the 10th dimension" <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_GQqUg6Ts" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_GQqUg6Ts</a><p>So is this basically visualizing the tree of possibilities from any board configuration, overlaid on itself at nodes where different sequences of moves can result in the same board configuration, allowing you to "jump" to a different "timeline" through the 5th dimension?
From all the descriptions, this is actually 4D, no?<p>Normal chess is 2 dimensions, plus you have time dimension (3D), plus you have parallel timelines - that always go just one dimension<p>So it's 4D and not 5D?<p>edit: yeah it's actually "just" 4D, from the explainer here<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/XyRJmuh" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/XyRJmuh</a>
It looks amazing, and I really want to play it, but however I count I only end up with 4 dimensions. A chess board is 2D, time back-and-forth is 3D, and going up/down across universes is 4D. What's the 5th? Are they counting real-life-time as the 5th? In which case normal chess is 3D, which seems like an abuse of terms.
We skipped right over the opportunity for non-integer fractal dimensional chess! In all seriousness, this looks super interesting. I’d love to see some live gameplay of it.
Would be interesting to see something like this with poker. There are some interesting, high variance games becoming increasingly popular and this would certainly be a cool wrinkle: "6 card high low Omaha with time travel".
3d chess is another popular variant: <a href="https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess" rel="nofollow">https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess</a><p>Lot of games you could spin up in this manner. I wonder if we are going to do that for all the board games with tried and old strategies. HN has any suggestions on what those board games should be?<p>Game on steam: <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Multiverse_Time_Travel/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Mul...</a><p>There is a discord linked in the game help menu where people are discussing lot of things including how to create a bot.<p>For the lazy: <a href="https://discord.gg/8kQhp6" rel="nofollow">https://discord.gg/8kQhp6</a><p>Edit: removed mobile url.
Happy to see this finally getting some traction on HN. I finally finished all of the puzzles a couple of days ago and I'm confident I'm going to file this one under the same file as Go: Fun to play, but even better to watch more skilled players analyze.
I’d love to see a chess variant where you could move pieces upside down to the bottom side of the board and make moves and pop back up onto the surface at strategic points. Lurker chess.
When I was learning about puzzle game making, one of the rules was people don't like puzzles. They like puzzles but not the feeling like they're doing one.<p>This is kind of the opposite. So it really competes with Fall Guys then...
Lichess[1] is a popular site to play chess online for free. They offer different chess variants to play against other people. Would be great if 5D chess was one of the variants to play online.<p>[1] <a href="https://lichess.org/" rel="nofollow">https://lichess.org/</a>