(en) I thought up a 4D Chess concept
It’s played on a regular chess board with regular chess pieces and regular rules, but each player has this ability to warp their (non-king) pieces across time. I figure it’s going to take a lot of note-taking and snapshotting pictures of the state of the board.
Like, I move my B2 bishop to F6 but it’ll move there in the third round after this. In the meantime, the bishop is gone, “warped.” If on the appointed round the path from where the piece warped (the piece is in B2, but the path starts from C3) until the point where it’s supposed to warp to (in this case F6) is unobstructed, the bishop reappears on F6, removing from play the piece that’s in F6 if one exists. If the path gets obstructed somehow, like from the opponent’s cunning strategies, the player gets penalized with, I dunno, having the warped piece just stay in the original square or just losing the warped piece altogether.
But that’s not all! Not only you can send your piece to the future, you can also get help from the future! Like, on a turn you can call a (non-king) piece from the future to appear right now. The catch is, not only you have to call what piece, you have to specify when it’ll warp from. On the turn where you’re supposed to warp the piece from, you have to actually do it; you need to have a piece of the same kind that can possibly move from its position to its warped position, and its path must not be obstructed on the turn back when you called it. If you can’t, then you break time-travelling laws and instantly lose the game. You also can’t call a piece to checkmate the opponent, since it’ll end the game and you couldn’t be warping that piece from the future if the game’s already ended.
Hey, that’s right! If you call a piece and then the opponent loses before you could fulfill the time-travelling contract, you lose the game instead. Now suicide moves become viable strategy! Except when both players have unfulfilled call contracts, I guess?
Don’t you need to think in 4D to play those actions? Warping your pieces to the future is kinda meh, like, you’re just laying traps around, but warping your pieces from the future requires actual 4D thinking since you’re setting up an attack that happens now, in the future.
Now play that with a 3D chess board and it’ll become an actual mind-bending clusterfuck 4D chess.