I don't ffing understand how checkmate works

[Erenussocrates]

^

[Rayalot72]

Can you be more specific?

If a king is in check in the past, you can't move it (as the board has already been played), so you need to either take that piece threatening your king or go far enough back in time that you can avoid playing the board you're threatened from. Note, going back in time on the board you're threatened from progresses that board, meaning it will be your opponents turn. This would give them the opportunity to take your king, so you'd need to play a different board to time travel.

[Erenussocrates]

If I block the check with a piece, the king is still mated because the way wasn't obstructed like 10 moves ago.

[Rayalot72]

This is correct, you need to make sure the opponent can't make use of open tiles to checkmate you on that turn sometime in the future.

[Erenussocrates]

Even just doing a nonsensical check itself is broken. It can lead to so much advantage where normally it doesn't. On top of that, the positions where the pieces can warp into the past also doesn't make sense. Pieces like knight and bishop can warp to places where they wouldn't be able to go to in their relative position in current time. It's so confusing and I cannot calculate what could happen because of that.

This screenshot at the end of my latest game could summarize my confusion the best.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1609429035400417253/728D453E4893BE9F77B5B19BE9EF43DD338F9571/

[NotASnowman]

Originally posted by Erenussocrates:

Even just doing a nonsensical check itself is broken. It can lead to so much advantage where normally it doesn't. On top of that, the positions where the pieces can warp into the past also doesn't make sense. Pieces like knight and bishop can warp to places where they wouldn't be able to go to in their relative position in current time. It's so confusing and I cannot calculate what could happen because of that.

This screenshot at the end of my latest game could summarize my confusion the best.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1609429035400417253/728D453E4893BE9F77B5B19BE9EF43DD338F9571/

In this image, it appears your opponent is doing a win condition I call "board locking". It's where you check an opponent simultaneously from every board, and make sure that at least one check is only resolvable via moving a piece on a different board where you are also in check. This means that you would only be able to resolve all the checks if you moved twice on one board (which is impossible), or went back in time. In the former scenario it results in a checkmate, in the latter it's sometimes possible to resolve the checks as that extra board you create grants you the extra move that you need.

The "time" and "multiverse" axes are functionally stacked like a 3D chessboard, and some pieces move differently to what you're used to in this environment. Knights can move one space onto an adjacent board and two horizontally or vertically, Rooks move up and down in addition to their usual movement, and bishops move along quadragonals (Z axis + X axis or Y axis) in addition to their usual diagonals (just X axis + Y axis, the vertical and horizontal in regular Chess).

It's a little hard to talk about this game concisely while also staying accurate since this game deals with movement through 4D space. There are some forms of movement that we simply don't have words for in any Human language that I know of, since Humans usually don't visualise time as a spacial direction, and thus Human languages never developed features like "differentiating between the two separate verticals present in 4D space" and "name for moving diagonally through time". This makes trying to discuss this without being confusing difficult, as the 5D chessboard in this game either features three different directions that could be described as "vertical", or two "verticals" and two "horizontals" depending on how you look at it.

I might not be much help, but looking into three-dimensional chess variants might help you understand the board and how pieces move on it better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess

There's also this wonderful guide to all the pieces, including the 5D Chess-specific ones, that can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2176513845


I hope these things are more useful to you than I can be.

[koimeiji]

The easiest way to understand 5D chess is to, well, completely forget everything you know about chess.


In normal 2D chess, how would you describe the movement of a Knight? It moves in an L pattern, right? While true, that's not actually how a Knight moves.

A knight moves two spaces in one direction, one space in another direction. This gives us the L shape in 2D chess, but in 5D chess those directions aren't limited to X and Y.

Instead, a knight could move two turns into the past, and one turn up/down/left/right. That satisfies how a knight moves, as well as many other possibilities.


How about the Bishop? In 2D, it's a diagonal along a color, but the reality is it moves in 2 directions equal distance. This makes it so a bishop is no longer locked to a single color; if it moves once back in time, it can then move once up/down/left/right and end up on a different color.


Looking at your screenshot, we can see the bishop behavior on the top queen (the top checkmate). On its next turn, it can move once in the past, and once down to take your king.



This is why the game specifically recommends to go for checkmates in the past; you can't move a piece on a turn that's already happened. So the queen can take your king, and you aren't able to stop it.

[Erenussocrates]

This is very interesting. Though the normal chess requires you to think ahead of time, this one also requires you to memorize where your pieces have been in the past, or where your king has been. The more moves you make, infinitely more openings you create in the past. Is all of this really possible to calculate while playing? Whenever I make a checkmate ingame, all of them are basically moves into the past that I didn't even realize myself, but the game stops me automatically.

[Wraith_Magus]

There are a few heuristics to keep in mind. For example, bishops are capable of horizontal or vertical checkmates in the past very easily. Even if you move your king, a bishop can checkmate your king in its past position, and because a piece can't move in a timeline where another move has already been made, "set" timelines are very vulnerable. You cannot block pieces retroactively, and you cannot move your king retroactively, so your only defense is taking the threatening piece.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that bishops can still be blocked even in time, so just keeping a piece (especially a pawn) in front of your king is protection. If you have to move a piece guarding the king or the king himself, moving them towards the opponent prevents gaps where a bishop can slip through, and can push a bishop to a spot where their positions to threaten are also within 1 tile and being taken by the king. Moving backward, however, leaves the bishop room to attack the past king and a possible space to go "between" the positions a blocking piece occupied. (I was put in checkmate when I moved a rook guarding my king back once this very way, and didn't see it coming.)

If you cannot keep a king covered, consider keeping all possible vectors of attack guarded. That is, just have a pawn or knight or something threaten every possible tile that threatens the king, so that any piece that puts you in check will be taken. This is much easier against knights, which have to attack from two tiles away or be backed up and one tile away (as a king can take a piece one tile away himself).

Also, remember that 5D chess is very much slanted in favor of offense.

A normal game of chess generally takes at least 2 attacking pieces to make checkmate, and it often takes a couple moves to get them into position, so you often have to make plans about four moves in advance to get a checkmate. Comparatively, you need only one piece in 5D chess, and can often have a couple different vectors of putting an opponent in check, which actually means that far less of your planning needs to be devoted to offense, as you can just randomly stumble onto moves that create checkmate in two moves or less. Offensively, 5D chess is ironically a much less strategic game. Devote all that brainpower to defense, instead.

Also, creating new timelines is advantageous when you are behind. More timelines is more chaotic and difficult to predict, and chaos always favors the underdog. Stick to normal chess with back-in-time checkmates if you're ahead.

A good way to go a long way back in time is to move a rook or queen onto a tile nobody has stepped upon, then on your next turn go back to the beginning of the game. (This is nicknamed "Jurassic Rook".) If you make your first move pushing out a knight, you can avoid ever moving a piece to b/g 1/8 ever again to leave open a space to let a rook go back to turn 2 as an emergency escape. That said, I once did this to land a rook on my opponent's queen 11 moves in the past after I had done an exchange of queens, bishops, and knights, and pre-empted the exchange so that I could avoid giving up my own queen and use it to attain checkmate before the timeline caught up with where I had sent the rook back.

[Erenussocrates]

I might need online sparring partners.

[NotASnowman]

Originally posted by Erenussocrates:

I might need online sparring partners.

I'm happy to play matches with you, I'll send you a friend request.