26 ms·

What is 5D chess?

225 points by hawkoy 6y ago

ThreeFx 6y ago
This looks amazing! Although I wouldn't be surprised if this was a forced first-player win.
- BbzzbB 6y ago
  Perhaps at an expert level, but given theory debt of even normal chess I hardly see how this could be an issue at very expert level but that's not for some years (assuming it gets a community but it clearly has a good start). It actually looks really fun, hopefully there isn't a way to cheese-win as white, but barring that it looks really fun and creative.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
How do you know if you have won? Or is it about avoiding checkmate in all possible timelines for all possible time travelling moves?
- treis 6y ago
  I'd think the same way you know you won regular chess. You capture the opponent's king. Checkmate is just an acknowledgement that the current player has no way of avoiding their opponent from taking their king on the next move.
  - aplummer 6y ago
    So checkmate in any one timeline counts? You couldn’t do all timelines.
    - n3k5 6y ago
      > So checkmate in any one timeline counts? Yes. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24065059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24065059 ) > You couldn’t do all timelines. How do you reckon that? I mean, it makes sense on an intuitive level; however, since now we're not talking about Conor Petersen's 5D chess, but the vast space of possible multiverse time travel chess variants, it's not obvious how one could prove this to be impossible in a somewhat rigorous way. For example, what if time-lines end when a king is mated (or wioll fore-when haven been mote [0]), but you only lose when you can't make a valid move in any time-line? [0] http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/guide.html http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/guide.html
    - learnstats2 6y ago
      I suppose you would have to avoid the king escaping to another timeline?
      - nsilvestri 6y ago
        You do , which is why it ends up being easier to attack kings in the past. Because you can't change the past, only create new timelines, attacking a king from any previous board state means that the attacking piece must be captured.
        asa4akj 6y ago
        does this means that attacking the starting king position will always put the king in check of the very first board? but, he can't really escape that
        xstas 6y ago
        Yes, but it's not that easy. Pieces still make threats according to their movement rules, whether through time or space. For example, if your king moves from its square and an enemy rook attacks its starting position (rooks can move any number of squares in any one direction), then it's mate unless you can take the rook. However, if in the intervening time, another piece lands on the same spot, then it will block subsequent rook checks through time on that square.
  - rcoveson 6y ago
    No, checkmate is the end state of the game, and the king cannot be captured. Any action by a player that would allow their king to be captured is an illegal move. When one player has no more legal moves, the game is over.
- n3k5 6y ago
  When there are multiple parallel time-lines, you have to input a move for each one before you can advance to the next turn. But to win, you have to mate just one of the opponent's kings. One player can have multiple kings on one board, because they can move through time and between time-lines. I have no idea what high-level play will end up looking like, but the streamer from whom I learned the above [0] said that the most common way to win is to mate a king on a board in the past. Those already have their options of escaping an attack restricted by ordinary chess rules; it gets worse when you can make additional threats from the future. [0] https://youtu.be/LOotGsWbaeA https://youtu.be/LOotGsWbaeA
- LegitShady 6y ago
  You only know when you've won or lost when the wavefront collapses to a 3d point you can experience in a particular time.
searchableguy 6y ago
3d chess is another popular variant: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess 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? Game on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Multiverse_Time_Travel/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Mul... There is a discord linked in the game help menu where people are discussing lot of things including how to create a bot. For the lazy: https://discord.gg/8kQhp6 https://discord.gg/8kQhp6 Edit: removed mobile url.
- mey 6y ago
  Some people are currently playing it on Twitch https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/5D%20Chess%20With%20Multiverse%20Time%20Travel https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/5D%20Chess%20With%20Mul...
- LeoPanthera 6y ago
  Non-mobile URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess
- ansible 6y ago
  > 3d chess is another popular variant: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess I was crazy enough as a high-schooler to actually build (with the help of my father) a 3D chess "board". It was mostly plywood, with eight 8x8 boards stacked vertically. I had previously gotten a "3D" chess board which was just three 8x8 boards. They weren't making Star Trek tri-dimensional chess sets back then. With the 8x8x8 3D board, movement rules for 2D chess have a "natural" expansion to 3D, with only a few corner cases. White player's non-pawn pieces start out on the bottom board, with the pawns on the next board up. In practice, it was hard to visualize how the game was going in general. We were constantly standing up and crouching to see. Only one of my friends wanted to play, and he only lasted about half a game. :-( With the failure to interest my friends, I had intended to write my own chess program to play it. I had started out with the 2D version, and was then intending to expand it later. The original was written in BASIC... and that did not go too well.
dihedral 6y ago
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.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  Hmm, fractal dimensional chess could perhaps be implemented as having subboards within each tile of a standard chessboard. Completely spitballing over lunch, I propose the following rule set: * Every square of a chessboard is itself a chessboard. This applies recursively. The top-level chessboard is named "Prime". All other chessboards are named according to the subdivision of Prime where they are located. So, the board located one level deep at F3 is called "Prime-F3". The board located two levels deep at A7 of Prime-F3 is called Prime-F3-A7. * All infinite chessboards start in the standard board starting position. * Black and white alternate making moves. Each move consists of moving a single piece within a single chessboard, following standard chess rules. * The game is won when a player does not have a King located in Prime. So far, this only introduces additional moves that can be made, which have no impact on the Prime board. Apart from being harder to force a draw, the subboards have no impact. Next up, adding rules to allow boards to influence the boards above/below them. * If player X has a piece on board Z in location Y, then all pieces belonging to player X in board Z-Y may, in addition to their normal move, also move like the piece in board Z. For example, at the start of the game, white has a queen on Prime at location D1. Therefore, in board Prime-D1 may move like a queen, in addition to their normal movement. * If player X does not have a King in board Z-Y, then their opponent may, as their move, move any piece from board Z-Y to board Z in location Y. For example, if Black has captured White's King on board Prime-D8, then Black may move any piece on Prime-D8 to the Prime board at location D8. Now, there is an incentive to playing on the lower level boards. Play here goes much faster, by virtue of having more moves available. By investing time into the subboards, you can gain additional pieces on the main board. If a subboard is being used to funnel more pieces in, then it may be worth investing in a subsubboard, in order to pull a king in from the subsubboard to the subboard.
- jerf 6y ago
  Arguably, that's what this is. The bifurcating timelines are better thought of as n-dimensional space. Describing the location of a piece requires a description of the bifurcations, which won't be a fixed number of numbers but will go up as the game progresses. Integer dimensions don't really cover this.
miloignis 6y ago
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.
- delgaudm 6y ago
  If the chess board is 2d, how does the Knight move, doesn't it need the third dimension to go "over" other pieces? I assume, graphics notwithstanding, the board is logically represented in 3 dimensions.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    Knights tunnel.
  - throwaway744678 6y ago
    I can't tell if this is sarcasm, but anyways: obviously an actual chessboard is indeed 3d - as are all physical objects in our world. Yet a chessboard is effectively a 2d space: any piece position is completely defined by a row and a column.
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      It's true that at the beginning and end of each move, every piece has a specific coordinate in a 2D space, but it is still nice to imagine that knights' moves (and castling) involve travelling through a third spatial dimension. And yes, the pieces themselves are conventionally thought of as volumes in 3D space rather than areas of a 2D plane.
      - baddox 6y ago
        There’s nothing wrong with defining the 2D world such that knights can pass through intermediate pieces or can simply teleport to a new location.
hokumguru 6y ago
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.
- feider 6y ago
  What is your opinion on how into the chess one needs to be to get a similar kind of experience out of the 5D chess? Asking as a casual hobby player.
  - xstas 6y ago
    I'd say you need to be comfortable with how the rules of chess work, but you don't need to be a chess player. The time travel rules even out the playing field for amateurs who play against actual chess players.
pmarreck 6y ago
Now I can "checkmate, bitches!" in another timeline... This is tremendous
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  I think that's called "Nothing personnel, kid". https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/teleports-behind-you-nothing-personal-kid https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/teleports-behind-you-nothing-...
dilippkumar 6y ago
I desperately want to go hang out on a forum where people are building AI bots to play this game.
- skavi 6y ago
  according to searchableguy, that’s happening right here: https://discord.gg/8kQhp6 https://discord.gg/8kQhp6
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
fileeditview 6y ago
Would love to see some GM stream this. Go Nakamura :)
zw123456 6y ago
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.
- zitterbewegung 6y ago
  That’s wrong you would have to add a fog of war where when the pieces interact you reveal the state of the piece. You wouldn’t know where your pieces are until you move them so all your pieces would Have be in a random order.
- sp332 6y ago
  There's a quantum tic-tac-toe variant which makes some practical compromises to make the game playable and scoreable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tic-tac-toe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tic-tac-toe
  - totetsu 6y ago
    Do players get to share an entangled particle beforehand? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22488927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22488927
- whelming_wave 6y ago
  There's a quantum chess game on Steam, titled Quantum Chess.
  - zw123456 6y ago
    HA ! Of course there is, that always happens to me, I think I am the first to think of something but then of course, a bunch of other people beat me to it :)
  - remram 6y ago
    Quantum Chess is different, it allows players to move a piece twice in the same turn (in sequence) at the cost of a 50% chance of not moving at all. This is different from issuing multiple different moves in one turn.
Yhippa 6y ago
I watched the video at the end three times and still couldn't figure it out.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqMEiBu4M1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqMEiBu4M1c
keyle 6y ago
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. This is kind of the opposite. So it really competes with Fall Guys then...
- nsilvestri 6y ago
  Outer Wilds does the whole "puzzle game without feeling like one" better than any other game I know.
  - egypturnash 6y ago
    God that game is SO GOOD. It gave me a lot of “I finished a puzzle” feeling without having to do any hard puzzles for a lot of it, until the point where I had to take a thing from the Hourglass Twins to another part of the system without fucking it up, with suddenly higher stakes. I stopped playing it for like a week when I knew that was what I had to do, because I had to be in the right mood...
throw1234651234 6y ago
90 comments and no Putin joke yet?
mxwsn 6y ago
'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." 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. Any time travel or dimension hops need to be worth twice as much, minimum, as a normal move to even consider making them. 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] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/hxqo6d/how_to_play_5d_chess_with_multiverse_time_travel/fz8nnqh/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/hxqo6d/how_to_play_5...
- JshWright 6y ago
  Without having played it, that seems like a reasonable balance.
- zxcvbn4038 6y ago
  Activate the Omega 13? https://galaxyquest.fandom.com/wiki/The_Omega_13_Device https://galaxyquest.fandom.com/wiki/The_Omega_13_Device
- gwenzek 6y ago
  > You used your turn in the present, and created a new board where it's their turn in the past. Doesn't it depend on the piece you use? Knights and Bishops seems to be able to move on the board and move back in time at the same time.
  - Doxin 6y ago
    Pieces have the same movement rules as normal chess. A knight for instance moves 3 spaces along one axis, and 1 space along another axis. If you time travel you're essentially sacrificing one of those spatial moves for a temporal move. For example 2 spaces back in time and 1 forward. So while it's not entirely giving up a move it's fairly close, especially for pieces that only move along a single axis at a time.
sixstringtheory 6y ago
The video at the end reminded me of "Imagining the 10th dimension" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_GQqUg6Ts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_GQqUg6Ts 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?
- gliese1337 6y ago
  Oh my gosh, I hate that "10th dimension" video so freaking much. It has done nothing but spread confusion and false understanding across the internet. If it were just presented as a fun exploration of what 10 dimensions could be, for fictional purposes, it would be... OKish, I guess. But choosing "10" specifically makes people erroneously think that this is what string theory is about, which is completely wrong. Additionally, it falls into the trap of assuming that curvature requires a higher dimension to curve in, and that nontrivial connectivity inherently requires such curvature, both of which are false and hard enough to explain to people who have not been explicitly taught wrongly already. And on top of all of that, it perpetuates the faulty idea that "the" 5th dimension, or "the" 10th dimension are sensible concepts, by presenting its particular choice of dimensions to discuss and its particular choice of ordering of those dimensions as fact.
kyleblarson 6y ago
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".
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
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. 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.
dasb 6y ago
Great, now I can suck at chess in 3 more dimensions.
- Yuioup 6y ago
  Just wait till somebody invents 5d Go
xwdv 6y ago
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.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Shogi? https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogi https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogi
otoburb 6y ago
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. [1] https://lichess.org/ https://lichess.org/
throwawaynothx 6y ago
Blackjack version, "Hit me.... ok stay"
cptroot 6y ago
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.
shp0ngle 6y ago
From all the descriptions, this is actually 4D, no? Normal chess is 2 dimensions, plus you have time dimension (3D), plus you have parallel timelines - that always go just one dimension So it's 4D and not 5D? edit: yeah it's actually "just" 4D, from the explainer here https://imgur.com/a/XyRJmuh https://imgur.com/a/XyRJmuh
- 87zuhjkas 6y ago
  It depends in real life you always have a 3D chess board (+ time dimension) and in some chess UIs you have the option to get a 3D board rendered, like in chessbase https://de.chessbase.com/Portals/All/2017/_eng/products/fritz16-18b-3dboard.jpg https://de.chessbase.com/Portals/All/2017/_eng/products/frit...
  - einr 6y ago
    But you actually only play the game in two dimensions, because the pieces cannot move up or down. Normal chess is a game happening on a 2D plane whether or not the representation of the board and pieces is 2D or 3D.
    - 87zuhjkas 6y ago
      No, because that again depends on the representation. You can store the information of moves and chess position in 1D. As for example, two players can play a game of chess just by exchanging moves via morse code.
- nigerian1981 6y ago
  They say the a 3rd dimension is unused so yeah I don’t understand why they didn’t just call it 4D chess.

What is 5D chess?

225 points by hawkoy 6y ago

ThreeFx 6y ago

This looks amazing! Although I wouldn't be surprised if this was a forced first-player win.

BbzzbB 6y ago
Perhaps at an expert level, but given theory debt of even normal chess I hardly see how this could be an issue at very expert level but that's not for some years (assuming it gets a community but it clearly has a good start). It actually looks really fun, hopefully there isn't a way to cheese-win as white, but barring that it looks really fun and creative.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

How do you know if you have won? Or is it about avoiding checkmate in all possible timelines for all possible time travelling moves?

treis 6y ago
I'd think the same way you know you won regular chess. You capture the opponent's king. Checkmate is just an acknowledgement that the current player has no way of avoiding their opponent from taking their king on the next move.
- aplummer 6y ago
  So checkmate in any one timeline counts? You couldn’t do all timelines.
  - n3k5 6y ago
    > So checkmate in any one timeline counts? Yes. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24065059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24065059 ) > You couldn’t do all timelines. How do you reckon that? I mean, it makes sense on an intuitive level; however, since now we're not talking about Conor Petersen's 5D chess, but the vast space of possible multiverse time travel chess variants, it's not obvious how one could prove this to be impossible in a somewhat rigorous way. For example, what if time-lines end when a king is mated (or wioll fore-when haven been mote [0]), but you only lose when you can't make a valid move in any time-line? [0] http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/guide.html http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/guide.html
  - learnstats2 6y ago
    I suppose you would have to avoid the king escaping to another timeline?
    - nsilvestri 6y ago
      You do , which is why it ends up being easier to attack kings in the past. Because you can't change the past, only create new timelines, attacking a king from any previous board state means that the attacking piece must be captured.
      - asa4akj 6y ago
        does this means that attacking the starting king position will always put the king in check of the very first board? but, he can't really escape that
        xstas 6y ago
        Yes, but it's not that easy. Pieces still make threats according to their movement rules, whether through time or space. For example, if your king moves from its square and an enemy rook attacks its starting position (rooks can move any number of squares in any one direction), then it's mate unless you can take the rook. However, if in the intervening time, another piece lands on the same spot, then it will block subsequent rook checks through time on that square.
- rcoveson 6y ago
  No, checkmate is the end state of the game, and the king cannot be captured. Any action by a player that would allow their king to be captured is an illegal move. When one player has no more legal moves, the game is over.
n3k5 6y ago
When there are multiple parallel time-lines, you have to input a move for each one before you can advance to the next turn. But to win, you have to mate just one of the opponent's kings. One player can have multiple kings on one board, because they can move through time and between time-lines. I have no idea what high-level play will end up looking like, but the streamer from whom I learned the above [0] said that the most common way to win is to mate a king on a board in the past. Those already have their options of escaping an attack restricted by ordinary chess rules; it gets worse when you can make additional threats from the future. [0] https://youtu.be/LOotGsWbaeA https://youtu.be/LOotGsWbaeA
LegitShady 6y ago
You only know when you've won or lost when the wavefront collapses to a 3d point you can experience in a particular time.

searchableguy 6y ago

3d chess is another popular variant: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess 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? Game on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Multiverse_Time_Travel/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Mul... There is a discord linked in the game help menu where people are discussing lot of things including how to create a bot. For the lazy: https://discord.gg/8kQhp6 https://discord.gg/8kQhp6 Edit: removed mobile url.

mey 6y ago
Some people are currently playing it on Twitch https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/5D%20Chess%20With%20Multiverse%20Time%20Travel https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/5D%20Chess%20With%20Mul...
LeoPanthera 6y ago
Non-mobile URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess
ansible 6y ago
> 3d chess is another popular variant: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess I was crazy enough as a high-schooler to actually build (with the help of my father) a 3D chess "board". It was mostly plywood, with eight 8x8 boards stacked vertically. I had previously gotten a "3D" chess board which was just three 8x8 boards. They weren't making Star Trek tri-dimensional chess sets back then. With the 8x8x8 3D board, movement rules for 2D chess have a "natural" expansion to 3D, with only a few corner cases. White player's non-pawn pieces start out on the bottom board, with the pawns on the next board up. In practice, it was hard to visualize how the game was going in general. We were constantly standing up and crouching to see. Only one of my friends wanted to play, and he only lasted about half a game. :-( With the failure to interest my friends, I had intended to write my own chess program to play it. I had started out with the 2D version, and was then intending to expand it later. The original was written in BASIC... and that did not go too well.

dihedral 6y ago

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.

MereInterest 6y ago
Hmm, fractal dimensional chess could perhaps be implemented as having subboards within each tile of a standard chessboard. Completely spitballing over lunch, I propose the following rule set: * Every square of a chessboard is itself a chessboard. This applies recursively. The top-level chessboard is named "Prime". All other chessboards are named according to the subdivision of Prime where they are located. So, the board located one level deep at F3 is called "Prime-F3". The board located two levels deep at A7 of Prime-F3 is called Prime-F3-A7. * All infinite chessboards start in the standard board starting position. * Black and white alternate making moves. Each move consists of moving a single piece within a single chessboard, following standard chess rules. * The game is won when a player does not have a King located in Prime. So far, this only introduces additional moves that can be made, which have no impact on the Prime board. Apart from being harder to force a draw, the subboards have no impact. Next up, adding rules to allow boards to influence the boards above/below them. * If player X has a piece on board Z in location Y, then all pieces belonging to player X in board Z-Y may, in addition to their normal move, also move like the piece in board Z. For example, at the start of the game, white has a queen on Prime at location D1. Therefore, in board Prime-D1 may move like a queen, in addition to their normal movement. * If player X does not have a King in board Z-Y, then their opponent may, as their move, move any piece from board Z-Y to board Z in location Y. For example, if Black has captured White's King on board Prime-D8, then Black may move any piece on Prime-D8 to the Prime board at location D8. Now, there is an incentive to playing on the lower level boards. Play here goes much faster, by virtue of having more moves available. By investing time into the subboards, you can gain additional pieces on the main board. If a subboard is being used to funnel more pieces in, then it may be worth investing in a subsubboard, in order to pull a king in from the subsubboard to the subboard.
jerf 6y ago
Arguably, that's what this is. The bifurcating timelines are better thought of as n-dimensional space. Describing the location of a piece requires a description of the bifurcations, which won't be a fixed number of numbers but will go up as the game progresses. Integer dimensions don't really cover this.

miloignis 6y ago

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.

delgaudm 6y ago
If the chess board is 2d, how does the Knight move, doesn't it need the third dimension to go "over" other pieces? I assume, graphics notwithstanding, the board is logically represented in 3 dimensions.
- sukilot 6y ago
  Knights tunnel.
- throwaway744678 6y ago
  I can't tell if this is sarcasm, but anyways: obviously an actual chessboard is indeed 3d - as are all physical objects in our world. Yet a chessboard is effectively a 2d space: any piece position is completely defined by a row and a column.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    It's true that at the beginning and end of each move, every piece has a specific coordinate in a 2D space, but it is still nice to imagine that knights' moves (and castling) involve travelling through a third spatial dimension. And yes, the pieces themselves are conventionally thought of as volumes in 3D space rather than areas of a 2D plane.
    - baddox 6y ago
      There’s nothing wrong with defining the 2D world such that knights can pass through intermediate pieces or can simply teleport to a new location.

hokumguru 6y ago

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.

feider 6y ago
What is your opinion on how into the chess one needs to be to get a similar kind of experience out of the 5D chess? Asking as a casual hobby player.
- xstas 6y ago
  I'd say you need to be comfortable with how the rules of chess work, but you don't need to be a chess player. The time travel rules even out the playing field for amateurs who play against actual chess players.

pmarreck 6y ago

Now I can "checkmate, bitches!" in another timeline... This is tremendous

dane-pgp 6y ago
I think that's called "Nothing personnel, kid". https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/teleports-behind-you-nothing-personal-kid https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/teleports-behind-you-nothing-...

dilippkumar 6y ago

I desperately want to go hang out on a forum where people are building AI bots to play this game.

skavi 6y ago
according to searchableguy, that’s happening right here: https://discord.gg/8kQhp6 https://discord.gg/8kQhp6
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

fileeditview 6y ago

Would love to see some GM stream this. Go Nakamura :)

zw123456 6y ago

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.

zitterbewegung 6y ago
That’s wrong you would have to add a fog of war where when the pieces interact you reveal the state of the piece. You wouldn’t know where your pieces are until you move them so all your pieces would Have be in a random order.
sp332 6y ago
There's a quantum tic-tac-toe variant which makes some practical compromises to make the game playable and scoreable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tic-tac-toe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tic-tac-toe
- totetsu 6y ago
  Do players get to share an entangled particle beforehand? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22488927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22488927
whelming_wave 6y ago
There's a quantum chess game on Steam, titled Quantum Chess.
- zw123456 6y ago
  HA ! Of course there is, that always happens to me, I think I am the first to think of something but then of course, a bunch of other people beat me to it :)
- remram 6y ago
  Quantum Chess is different, it allows players to move a piece twice in the same turn (in sequence) at the cost of a 50% chance of not moving at all. This is different from issuing multiple different moves in one turn.

Yhippa 6y ago

I watched the video at the end three times and still couldn't figure it out.

searchableguy 6y ago
Try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqMEiBu4M1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqMEiBu4M1c

keyle 6y ago

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. This is kind of the opposite. So it really competes with Fall Guys then...

nsilvestri 6y ago
Outer Wilds does the whole "puzzle game without feeling like one" better than any other game I know.
- egypturnash 6y ago
  God that game is SO GOOD. It gave me a lot of “I finished a puzzle” feeling without having to do any hard puzzles for a lot of it, until the point where I had to take a thing from the Hourglass Twins to another part of the system without fucking it up, with suddenly higher stakes. I stopped playing it for like a week when I knew that was what I had to do, because I had to be in the right mood...

throw1234651234 6y ago

90 comments and no Putin joke yet?

mxwsn 6y ago

'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." 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. Any time travel or dimension hops need to be worth twice as much, minimum, as a normal move to even consider making them. 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] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/hxqo6d/how_to_play_5d_chess_with_multiverse_time_travel/fz8nnqh/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/hxqo6d/how_to_play_5...

JshWright 6y ago
Without having played it, that seems like a reasonable balance.
zxcvbn4038 6y ago
Activate the Omega 13? https://galaxyquest.fandom.com/wiki/The_Omega_13_Device https://galaxyquest.fandom.com/wiki/The_Omega_13_Device
gwenzek 6y ago
> You used your turn in the present, and created a new board where it's their turn in the past. Doesn't it depend on the piece you use? Knights and Bishops seems to be able to move on the board and move back in time at the same time.
- Doxin 6y ago
  Pieces have the same movement rules as normal chess. A knight for instance moves 3 spaces along one axis, and 1 space along another axis. If you time travel you're essentially sacrificing one of those spatial moves for a temporal move. For example 2 spaces back in time and 1 forward. So while it's not entirely giving up a move it's fairly close, especially for pieces that only move along a single axis at a time.

sixstringtheory 6y ago

The video at the end reminded me of "Imagining the 10th dimension" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_GQqUg6Ts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_GQqUg6Ts 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?

gliese1337 6y ago
Oh my gosh, I hate that "10th dimension" video so freaking much. It has done nothing but spread confusion and false understanding across the internet. If it were just presented as a fun exploration of what 10 dimensions could be, for fictional purposes, it would be... OKish, I guess. But choosing "10" specifically makes people erroneously think that this is what string theory is about, which is completely wrong. Additionally, it falls into the trap of assuming that curvature requires a higher dimension to curve in, and that nontrivial connectivity inherently requires such curvature, both of which are false and hard enough to explain to people who have not been explicitly taught wrongly already. And on top of all of that, it perpetuates the faulty idea that "the" 5th dimension, or "the" 10th dimension are sensible concepts, by presenting its particular choice of dimensions to discuss and its particular choice of ordering of those dimensions as fact.

kyleblarson 6y ago

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".

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

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. 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.

dasb 6y ago

Great, now I can suck at chess in 3 more dimensions.

Yuioup 6y ago
Just wait till somebody invents 5d Go

xwdv 6y ago

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.

searchableguy 6y ago
Shogi? https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogi https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogi

otoburb 6y ago

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. [1] https://lichess.org/ https://lichess.org/

throwawaynothx 6y ago

Blackjack version, "Hit me.... ok stay"

cptroot 6y ago

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.

shp0ngle 6y ago

From all the descriptions, this is actually 4D, no? Normal chess is 2 dimensions, plus you have time dimension (3D), plus you have parallel timelines - that always go just one dimension So it's 4D and not 5D? edit: yeah it's actually "just" 4D, from the explainer here https://imgur.com/a/XyRJmuh https://imgur.com/a/XyRJmuh

87zuhjkas 6y ago
It depends in real life you always have a 3D chess board (+ time dimension) and in some chess UIs you have the option to get a 3D board rendered, like in chessbase https://de.chessbase.com/Portals/All/2017/_eng/products/fritz16-18b-3dboard.jpg https://de.chessbase.com/Portals/All/2017/_eng/products/frit...
- einr 6y ago
  But you actually only play the game in two dimensions, because the pieces cannot move up or down. Normal chess is a game happening on a 2D plane whether or not the representation of the board and pieces is 2D or 3D.
  - 87zuhjkas 6y ago
    No, because that again depends on the representation. You can store the information of moves and chess position in 1D. As for example, two players can play a game of chess just by exchanging moves via morse code.
nigerian1981 6y ago
They say the a 3rd dimension is unused so yeah I don’t understand why they didn’t just call it 4D chess.