5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel

I don't often think about the design work that goes into making sure games (even highly complex ones) have accessible mechanics that players can actually process. From that perspective, 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel is a fascinating case study: a game so devoted to its high concept that human-playability falls to a distant second place on the priority list.

Apart from being only 4-dimensional, 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel is exactly what it sounds like. The designers started with the idea of "a game of chess in which pieces can move backward in time, which creates branching timelines, and pieces can also move between those timelines", ironed out all of the ambiguities inherent in this description, and called it a game. (This is maybe selling the work a bit short -- because the concept is inherently a complicated one, there are a lot of weird subtleties that come with this premise, and the designers have clearly put a lot of thought into how to resolve them as cleanly as they can.)

The result delicately straddles the line between a game with interesting emergent strategy and a joke. Casually, this game is too complicated to play. The clearest indicator of this is that it's common to win on accident, checkmating an opposing king in the past without realizing it, which doesn't look good. At the same time, there is a lot of genuine potential depth in the rules. It's clear that, if two people were willing to treat the game as more than a joke, and put in the time to get accustomed to the dizzying array of tactics available, they could probably have an interesting match. The problem is the colossal barrier to entry.

Instead, I would say the aspect of this game that actually works is the puzzles. There are 49 mate-in-N puzzles dealing with the different types of pieces and tactics associated with them, most of which are tricky but doable. In my view, these puzzles do a much better job of implementing the appealing but absurd premise as something that actually makes sense to play: they introduce the player to the consequences of the game's mechanics step-by-step in a controlled environment, cutting down the mind-boggling variety of things that can happen while still leaving plenty of complexity. The puzzles still aren't the most elegant, but they're enjoyable enough.

While 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel doesn't quite shake the notion that it's an eye-catching title first and a game second, there's some degree of care in implementing the game's mechanics, and viewed as a puzzle game with a silly PvP mode rather than a PvP game, it does okay for itself.

0.5

what da hell ?!?!