Every piece moves through all three dimensions.
An original abstract strategy game on a 5×5×5 lattice: 125 cells, five levels, seven piece types whose direction sets run through the whole volume. Not chess with a third axis bolted on — a rules system built for one from the first line. Two games are played on it: the lattice as it is, and one with a way off it.
The same lattice, the same seven pieces, the same opponent at the same six strengths. What differs is whether the board is the whole world.
Towers slide upward as readily as along a rank. Pawns capture diagonally and vertically. A check can arrive from a board you were not looking at, and a Sovereign with 26 neighbours is very hard to trap — which changes what a winning position even looks like.
The Sentinel is two posts at the 2:1 offset it leaps by. The Lancer is a spire whose edges face the body diagonals. The flat token is the spatial model seen from above, because a flat board is a plan — so you can read a piece you have never met.
No game engine, no chess library, no imported camera controls. The rules, the WebGPU renderer and Strata — the search engine that plays it — were written from scratch, under a constraint that was the point rather than an obstacle.
The figure above is one Regent standing at the centre of the lattice, with a line drawn along each of its twenty-six directions until that direction runs into a wall. It is generated from the same frozen direction tables the engine moves by — if a piece ever gained a direction, the picture would gain a line. Every piece has a figure like it on the rules page.
The game is complete and playable now: a full rules engine with check, mate, stalemate, promotion, repetition and the rest; five flat boards you can play entirely from the keyboard; a slice view for reading a vertical line of attack; a spatial projection when your browser can draw one; and a purpose-built opponent at six strengths, the weakest of which will give you pieces. It works on a phone, and it works without WebGPU. Choose Oblique 4D above and rifts open under your pieces: send one through and it leaves the board for a few turns, then lands somewhere new — and has to move.
Free to play, and it needs nothing. No account, no install, no network after the page loads. The engine runs in a worker in your own tab.