#5d chess

I didn't think it could. I though hypertoroidal chess was as bad as it got. I was wrong. I was so, so, so wrong.

This, is a 2D 4-player chess board. The way its constructed is by taking the furthest edges of each direction, and extruding an (n-1) dimensional slice in the extreme direction of choice.

Behold, a 4D multiplayer Chess board.

Now the number of players is dependent on the layout, and how you place the pieces. Now the number of players is dependent on the layout, and how you place the pieces.

This configuration, has 8 players: {+x, -x, +y, -y, +z, -z, +w, -w} playing red, green, white, black, orange, blue, yellow, purple, respectively. This means that each player has one "forward" direction which brings them to their immediate rival. okay well, there are definitely some sign errors in there but you get the point. Below, we have a different version that only has 4 players.

They are {+xz, -xz, +yw, -yw} playing red, green, white, black, respectively. Finally 4 players also allows for a fun multiverse time travel quirk. We can add a whole new multiversal dimension!

So 5D chess with multiverse time travel is played with a 2D board. This uses a 5D board, as its *base,* before we start slapping on any time travel shenanigans. Today someone was finally crazy enough to play me on this board. Some highlights from this game: This jurassic queen shooting back to the beginning of the game roughly 7 full turns into the past

This 3-way rook fork with a unicorn:

Me thinking this pawn was defended by just a singular rook (at least one knight is defending it with just a regular 2D knight move):

My opponent *correctly predicting* that I was going to exploit this opening

Except across timelines as we caught up to this point on the parallel timeline she split off. Here's where she noticed

where the idea was to place my queen in a spot where she was targeting the enemy king in the past AFTER i had split off this new timeline

HOWEVER i never made it that far, this is a dramatic recreation to show what the plan is. I actually ended up back tracking and we just played the main two timelines. Here's a unicorn snipe i had set up since literally my first move. The unicorn got captured by a knight, but i recaptured with a unicorn to re-set it up:

In the end, I moved a dragon multiversally across the timline

which threatens check

Now my opponent should have just blocked with a pawn honestly, since this isnt a time travel attack, but instead she captured with a unicorn

Which after i cash-in that triple rook fork for a trivial check

Lets me get a checkmate now that the unicorn is out of the way

Its my own client, a personal project called nDimensional Time Travel Chess

I played and lost 4 games with my friend. She remains the Queen of higher dimensional time travel chess, but that's not unexpected.

The biggest thing i struggle with is a technique involved in the infamous f7 sac for 5D chess with multiverse time travel. Basically, a piece time travels onto a square that only the king is defending, forcing the king to capture that piece. Then a second piece (usually a past version of the one that traveled) capitalizes on this weaker position placing the moved king into a soft mate. In our first game this dragon moved back in time to the beginning of the game

Capturing this pawn

Threatening my king one multiverse across, with the only resolution being to capture the dragon with my king on this current timeline

Here I make a mistake and try to defend against a pentagonal that would have come 2 turns later, while missing the quadragonal that came this next turn. Basically i was being wary of this quadragonal, which would be a pentagonal time travel attack

When I should have been wary of this triagonal, that turns into a quadragonal time travel attack. Now i still have a timline open, and timeline advantage...

But ultimately get checkmated by an extremely similar situation

The second game we played went very similarly, it was just slower because she played black, so had a significant disadvantage due to how time travel games favor white so heavily without turn 0. I was undone by roughly the same trick. The arrows look pretty i think

Our third game was playing a time travel variant of Space Chess, a 5x5x5 3D chess layout. This one was incredibly quick because i opened up a very dangerous line of attack pretty carelessly, but she also had set it up from the beginning specifically in case i did so.

The game starts pretty normal. I trade a unicorn for her knight, we develop a piece or two. Here I realize i opened up a triagonal time travel attack thats gotten me in the past so i move my bishop to let the rook defend it

Which is where i make the mistake of opening up this line by moving my pawn forward

She pushes her queen forward, checking me normally

I block the attack with my bishop, thinking ""oh this is a really good position, i have her queen forked because if she moves it out of the way she's in check

To which she responds with a trivial check, basically just forcing me to burn a turn capturing the unicorn targeting my king in the past

Which allows the Queen i have "Pinned" to hit my king in the past with a time travel attack now that enough time has caught up to allow her to pass through everything.

Absolutely diabolical game lol.

If you've been following up till now i don't think this last game needs much explanation. Something of note is that there are so many avenues of attacking the f7 equivalent here that I felt to just be constantly playing a game of whack-a-mole and the second i looked away, boom time travel sac