I played this game some and I have mixed feelings. On one hand, the concept is excellent and the execution is incredible. All of the pieces move pretty naturally in four dimensions, and it doesn't...
I played this game some and I have mixed feelings.
On one hand, the concept is excellent and the execution is incredible. All of the pieces move pretty naturally in four dimensions, and it doesn't take too long to get used to rank–time–universe triagonals etc. It feels really cool when you can pull off a mating tactic where you have to go back in time and make a check across universes.
On the other hand, it is simply too complicated. It's straightforward enough to keep track of two, maybe three simultaneous boards; but any more and you would have to scan literally dozens of positions to track attacks even on one board, never mind making safe positional improvements. It's just unmanageable.
There are 5×5 and 4×4 variants, which I imagine would be decent enough to play once you got the hang of it — but here again attack diagonals can be arbitrarily long because you can drop a bishop from 10 universes upwards and 10 moves ago. So if you want to rule out that kind of complexity explosion, you have to disallow queens, bishops, and pawns (since they can promote). I think rooks are pretty easy though. The added unicorns and dragons, which respectively attack along triagonals and quadragonals, are balanced enough to play as well.
The final weakness is that you can checkmate in the past. That is, when an opponent's piece moves back in time to create a new timeline, you have to make sure that you can defend all checks made from the new board to all other boards, as well as all discovered checks from all the old boards onto the new board. I get that this is one of the main features (again, it's really cool to get a bishop-against-king checkmate), but I'm not so sure it makes for a fun strategy game.
Oh, here's a cool little thing: it's really easy to stalemate. If you have a pawn, simply empty one universe, block those pieces, and push the pawn forward. Now there's no legal moves and you tie. I actually think that's pretty neat.
All in all, the concept is very, very cool, and it's fun to play around with. Even the mate-in-two puzzles are very tricky. But I'm not sure it stands up as a competitive strategy game. For humans, anyway.
I played this game some and I have mixed feelings.
On one hand, the concept is excellent and the execution is incredible. All of the pieces move pretty naturally in four dimensions, and it doesn't take too long to get used to rank–time–universe triagonals etc. It feels really cool when you can pull off a mating tactic where you have to go back in time and make a check across universes.
On the other hand, it is simply too complicated. It's straightforward enough to keep track of two, maybe three simultaneous boards; but any more and you would have to scan literally dozens of positions to track attacks even on one board, never mind making safe positional improvements. It's just unmanageable.
There are 5×5 and 4×4 variants, which I imagine would be decent enough to play once you got the hang of it — but here again attack diagonals can be arbitrarily long because you can drop a bishop from 10 universes upwards and 10 moves ago. So if you want to rule out that kind of complexity explosion, you have to disallow queens, bishops, and pawns (since they can promote). I think rooks are pretty easy though. The added unicorns and dragons, which respectively attack along triagonals and quadragonals, are balanced enough to play as well.
The final weakness is that you can checkmate in the past. That is, when an opponent's piece moves back in time to create a new timeline, you have to make sure that you can defend all checks made from the new board to all other boards, as well as all discovered checks from all the old boards onto the new board. I get that this is one of the main features (again, it's really cool to get a bishop-against-king checkmate), but I'm not so sure it makes for a fun strategy game.
Oh, here's a cool little thing: it's really easy to stalemate. If you have a pawn, simply empty one universe, block those pieces, and push the pawn forward. Now there's no legal moves and you tie. I actually think that's pretty neat.
All in all, the concept is very, very cool, and it's fun to play around with. Even the mate-in-two puzzles are very tricky. But I'm not sure it stands up as a competitive strategy game. For humans, anyway.
Official website: https://www.5dchesswithmultiversetimetravel.com/
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBzX1ybigmw
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230