

What does it mean for a pawn to reach the opponent's home row when the home row could be considered anything from a row to an entire cube in 4 dimensions.
4D CHESS CODE
I got skeleton code down fast, but once it came time to start defining what each piece could do, I ended up redefining what each could do multiple times. There were a few key road bumps on the project 1) Defining and visualizing the movement was much more difficult than I had anticipated I believe it allows for possibly interesting opening tactics while still looking, feeling, and playing balanced. I took inspiration from Raumschach in how I positioned them, but the design is mine. The board itself is designed around the 5x5x5 Raumschach version of 3D chess, becoming a 5x5x5x5 board with 1 king, 2 queens, 6 bishops, 8 knights, 8 rooks, and 25 pawns each. The two images used for knights come courtesy of. The few images used were made in GIMP 2, but they are pretty obviously not the most impressive chess pieces I've mocked up.
4D CHESS SOFTWARE
The software is entirely in Java dispersed unevenly among a fair few classes I used IntelliJ IDEA for this project. It determines what moves each player could make and displays those options in an intuitive manner. It has a very rough but still understandable GUI housing a 2 dimensional representation of the board's 4 dimensions. It creates then runs a 2 player game of four dimensional chess. I thought rather than digging through the internet for one, it would be a good test of my own spatial reasoning and abstract design skills to create my own version then balance the movement and eventually play it seriously/competitively. That being said, while versions of 3D chess exist, I couldn't easily find any playable four dimensional variations. The more dimensions, the more ironic the use is intended to be.

However, "Playing 4D chess" turns that around and starts being used ironically as a way of saying you are out-thinking yourself, and your idea of strategy is so complex that it flops worse than a basic strategy. "Playing 3D chess" is a term for when you take strategy to an extreme and seriously out-think a problem or opponent: a great compliment.
