March 29, 2026
Checkmate? More like check-maybe
Twelve Dimensional Chess is Stupid (2018)
Internet roasts “12D chess” — math fans say it’s just endless hide‑and‑seek
TLDR: A blogger argues “12D chess” makes checkmate nearly impossible because the board gets too vast and pieces cover almost nothing, dunking on the meme. Commenters split: purists cheer the math, while gamers say “change the rules,” citing 5D time‑travel chess as proof creative variants can work.
A mathy blog post just torched the “twelve-dimensional chess” meme, arguing that in super-high dimensions the board gets so huge that pieces barely threaten anything. Translation for non-nerds: the queen covers a tiny slice of the neighborhood and you’d need about 65 queens to trap a king. Cue the internet pile-on. One camp cheered, yelling “stop calling bad strategy ‘galaxy brain’!” They loved the visual of a lonely king wandering a massive board, dodging danger like it’s empty space. Another camp clapped back: rules aren’t sacred — tweak how pieces move and you get a real game. A gamer swooped in with receipts, pointing to 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel: yes, people already play time-bending chess, and it’s chaotic fun. Meme lords went wild: “In 12D you can’t even find the board,” “Checkmate? More like check-maybe,” and “Wake me when the 65-queen meta drops.” Meanwhile, purists drooled over the numbers, crowning this the final word on the overused metaphor and nodding to the “curse of too much space.” The vibe? Spicy, nerdy, and very online — with bonus side quests to John D. Cook’s knight-in-3D post for the geometry-curious.
Key Points
- •In d-dimensional chess, a queen covers 2^{d+1}−1 squares in a king’s neighborhood; in 12D this is 8,191.
- •A king’s neighborhood in 12D has 3^{12}=531,441 squares; a single queen covers about 1.54% of these.
- •Approximately 65 queens would be required to checkmate a king in open space in 12D, by the author’s calculation.
- •The author suggests a non-losing strategy: move the king away from boundaries and stay away, limiting checkmate possibilities.
- •Estimated board scale: about 2.2 billion internal squares and 68.7 billion total; each queen attacks up to ~1.86 million squares, implying sparse control even with many queens.