The Galactic Empire of Sol has collapsed, just as the futurists predicted. All that is left now is a sprawling web of kingdoms great and small, fighting for the scraps of the Orion arm. Across the Arm there emerged a dense and shifting mosaic of successor states: stellar kingdoms, merchant hegemonies, spacenoid colony fleets, and autonomous fortress-worlds. Once again, humanoids of all kinds battle each other in interstellar space. In this environment, victory increasingly depended on the ability to reason spatially in three dimensions. Times of war have led to games of war, and a new variant of an old Terran game has emerged as a popular pastime among the astral lords and their glittering courts. It is an abstract game which is thought to hone the ability of leaders to think in three dimensions. The spacenoids called it "Cosmochess", while the Solarian successor states called it the chess of the astral lords, or "Astrochess."
Astrochess is a re-imagining of chess for the three-dimensional battlespace of an interplanetary age. Astrochess abandons inherited assumptions of 2D planar movement and uses several new piece types. Instead of forcing traditional chess pieces into the third dimension, Astrochess is designed from the ground up for a three-dimensional space. Each piece moves following a simple logic that is derived from the geometry of a cube lattice, rather than from the desire to translate classic chess movements into a 3D space. Astrochess is an abstract strategy game for the era of space travel. In the grand stage of neoterran space, thinking three-dimensionally is a matter of life and death.
