New to 3D chess?See what makes it different in 30 seconds
3D Chess
What differs from regular chess
How to winCheckmate the enemy king. Because a king escapes so easily in 3D, capturing every enemy piece also wins (you can switch back to the original 1907 rules in settings).
How the pieces move
Tap a piece to see its moves on a small 3D board.
Controls
Drag to rotate. Green dots are the squares it can reach.
Settings are kept per mode. You can choose different values for playing the AI and for two players.
3-dimensional chess, or Raumschach, is played on a 5×5×5 cube of 125 squares. Ferdinand Maack invented it in Germany in 1907. Pieces move up and down through the levels as well as across them, which makes it a genuinely different game from flat chess rather than a re-skin of it.
No signup and no install: it runs in your browser. Play against the AI on your own, or pass one device back and forth with a friend.
The board is 125 squares: five 5×5 boards stacked from A at the bottom to E at the top. Files run a to e and ranks 1 to 5. A square is written level-file-rank, so the centre is Cc3.
White starts on the two lowest levels (A and B), Black on the two highest (D and E), and level C starts empty. Each side has 20 pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, two unicorns and ten pawns.
Each piece extends its flat-chess move into three dimensions.
| King | One square in any of the 26 directions. |
| Queen | Any distance in all 26 directions - rook, bishop and unicorn combined. |
| Rook | Any distance along one axis: forward and back, left and right, up and down. |
| Bishop | Any distance along the 12 diagonals where two axes change together. |
| Knight | 24 jumps: one and two squares along two axes. It can leap over pieces. |
| Unicorn | Any distance along the 8 space diagonals where all three axes change. It can only reach a quarter of the board. |
| Pawn | Moves one square forward or up, captures on five diagonals, promotes on the far rank of the top level. |
A pawn moves one square forward or one square up (for White; Black moves back and down). It captures on five diagonal squares. There is no two-square opening move, and therefore no en passant.
A pawn promotes only when it reaches the far rank on the top level: rank 5 of level E for White, rank 1 of level A for Black. That corner is a long way off, so promoting a pawn is a real project.
The unicorn moves along the space diagonals: the eight directions where all three coordinates change at once. Flat chess has no equivalent.
A side effect of that move is that a unicorn can only ever reach a quarter of the board. It is the same idea as a bishop being stuck on one colour, except that in three dimensions the board splits four ways instead of two. Unicorns are not powerful, but they cover escape routes no other piece can, which makes them essential for delivering mate.
As in chess, you win by checkmating the king. But on a 3D board a king can have up to 26 escape squares, and a king and rook cannot force mate at all. Left alone, the game draws far too often.
So this site adds the following rules by default. You can switch back to the original ones in settings at any time.
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