Star Trek: Tri-Dimensional Chess
strategy
Tri-Dimensional Chess is the three-level chess set from the old show, as a game you can open in a browser tab. Three small boards hang one above the other, each shifted two rows from the last so the rows in between line up like stairs, and four tiny boards on poles slide around the corners. You see the whole stack in 3D and can turn it, fade the decks you don't care about, or look straight down at it.
Tap a piece and every square it can reach glows, on every deck at once, with a thread to each landing square so a move up or down a deck is easy to follow. Tap a glowing square to move. A pawn that reaches the far side asks what it becomes.
Every side can be a person or the computer, so you can play a friend on one screen, play the computer (easy, medium or hard), or watch two computers play each other and pause when you want to look closer. Undo takes back your last move, and the computer's reply with it.
This is a non-commercial fan game: no ads, nothing to buy, no accounts. Fan game, not affiliated with Paramount.
Rules
Pieces move as in ordinary chess within a deck. Where two decks overlap, a square exists on both. A rook, bishop or queen follows its line and may step onto another deck that has a square on that line, but never back onto a deck it already used in the same move. Rooks and queens can also move straight up or down through the decks. A knight may land on any deck at its target file and rank.
Instead of moving a piece you may slide one of your four little boards to a nearby corner, if it is empty or holds only one pawn of yours. Check, checkmate and stalemate work as in chess. Three repetitions of a position, or 100 moves without a pawn move or capture, are draws.
These are simplified from the fan-written Federation Standard rules: no castling, no flipping a little board, no neutral boards, and no pawn double step. The starting position is our own, because the fan rulebook is paid; the full list of differences is in the game's repository.
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