5D Chess, on the other hand, makes me feel like that uncle likely did. This is not possible. How. What. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? I have yet to experience a single defeat or victory that I understood. And I don’t like it. The basic idea of 5D Chess is that instead of moving your pieces around as normal, you can (sometimes) send them back in time, to add them to an earlier state that the board was in. It does this not in the Achron way, with its single timeline periodically reordering events and erasing units in an attempt to enforce linear causality. Instead, whenever a unit goes back in time, a new timeline is formed. This means two boards are now in play, running parallel to each other, and you have to make a move on each of them. You can then move pieces through time again, opening a third timeline, or crossing between the current two. You might think this makes for some immensely satisfying matches where you and your opponent get embroiled in escalating mindgames and interlinked plots and decoys, only for one of you to pull off a brilliant victory by suddenly moving the piece you sent back in time for no apparent reason 8 moves ago. What actually happens is that you keep winning games but you have absolutely no idea why. You see this? I’m playing as black here, and I’ve just won. I didn’t question it at first. But then… no. No, this isn’t checkmate. They can move their king. And it’s not hopeless either. If they move their king to the right, they’re fine. I can’t even hurt them much on my next turn. Sure, they’re clearly on the defensive, and I fancy my chances, but it’s still open. A few games later I think I got why this one was checkmate. After suffering several defeats that were very similar, I learned that you lose the game if you can’t make as many moves as there are active timelines. Quite often, if your king only has one escape route, it’s all over. This makes a charging queen even more absurdly powerful, and honestly? It’s very anticlimactic. I keep being surprised by my own victories. But it gets weirder than this. When you send a unit back in time, it doesn’t move how you’d expect. Say your bishop, which normally moves diagonally, moves to another board. It doesn’t go directly to the same physical location, nor does it just transfer its diagonal moves to another board. Instead, each piece has its own new rules on how it moves when going back in time or jumping to another timeline. It’s a fun concept, but what it means in practice is now you have a tonne of new oblique rules to think about, and instead of a single board where you can see every possibility, you now need to scroll around and mentally cross-reference as many boards as there have been turns in the game so far, and potentially multiplied several times if you have several timelines going. And it means that games are often won because now a knight is actively threatening a load of extra squares on a board from six moves ago. I’ll be honest, I kind of hate it. The time travel is one thing, but combining it with the weird physical movement is such a ballache that I just end up playing regular chess instead, doing my best to ignore my opponent’s schemes. I am, ironically, like an old European king, idiotically playing pompous games while Napoleon’s armies cheat by being competent instead of posh. They didn’t understand why they kept losing, and only won kind of by accident, too. My brain is already an ever shifting Gordian knot of possibilities when I’m not playing chess. I don’t need this in my life. But what really gets me is this game: I’m playing as black, right. You might notice that the opponent has two kings - don’t worry about that too much. This is the second of two timelines, and their king from the original has fled here. If I capture either of the kings on this board I win. I have a few plans for doing that. I decide to move my pawn on the left to take the white horsey, giving room to bring my castle into play. Oh, that’s checkmate. I’ve won. WHAT. When I click on the exclamation mark, a line appears to “explain” that my horsey in the top right corner is… able to take the king in the past? But neither of them has moved for several turns, so why can it do that now but… what? For the sake of completeness, here’s the other active board. I moved my bishop up a bit, threatening neither king. WHAT? WHAT? HOW? HOW IN THE EVERLASTING CHRIST WAS THAT A WINNING I mean, uh… ha ha! You see? Foolish challenger! You ignorant peasants should stick to ONE DEE chess, fnaw fnaw. I am very smart.
