Everybody knows about chess. Star Trek fans probably also know about 3D chess, which is a real thing that you can actually play if you can wrap your mind around it.
And now, thanks to Thunkverse developer Conor Petersen, we have 5D Chess, a new game “with spatial, temporal, and parallel dimensions.”
I can already hear your gears grinding at the mere thought of additional dimensions, but I’ll do my best to keep this explanation simple. You should already know about the usual three dimensions of up and down, left and right, and forward and backward, and the fourth dimension is usually defined as time travel. The fifth dimension is the ability to travel between alternate realities that are created due to traveling through time.
Because 5D Chess doesn’t really have an up and down component, it should honestly be called "4D Chess", but that would probably just confuse people.
All the chess pieces move the same as you’d normally expect, but they all have additional rules that govern how they move in time and space. The pawn, for example, can move forward on the board or forward in time, but it can’t travel between timelines (dimensions). Similarly, the rook can travel forward or backward in its own timeline, but it can’t travel between timelines (dimensions).
We're not even going to get into what the knight can do.
Timelines are represented in 5D Chess by multiple boards that are placed parallel to each other, indicating that they’re parallel timelines that branched off when a piece time traveled. This means you can have quite a few different regular games of chess going on at once, and also that the technical winner of a game of 5D Chess is the person that wins in the most timelines.
Most reviews on Steam are positive, although most also admit that they don’t truly understand the game. Honestly, I don’t blame them--the human mind was never meant to comprehend time travel and multiverse theory.
You can pick up 5D Chess on Steam for 20% right now. Just note that you should probably come into the game with a Ph.D., or at least a master's in quantum mechanics.