ABOUT THE GAME
Anisomorphic is an independent board-game project created by Michael Rosmer. Every turn asks you to make a move, then reshape the system everyone is playing inside.
THE IDEA
Most strategy games give players a fixed board and a fixed set of movements. Anisomorphic begins with recognizable ideas—directional pieces, chess-like rays, leaps, captures, and Messiahs—but makes the board and movement rules available for players to transform.
That creates a different kind of decision. A morphism can improve your own position, rescue a threatened piece, disrupt an opponent’s plan, or alter what every matching piece will be able to do on the next turn.
INSPIRATION
From homemade childhood games to the game John Nash develops in A Beautiful Mind, the inspiration was to create something with relatively simple foundations and real strategic sophistication. Changing rules make even familiar pieces capable of producing unfamiliar decisions.
THE PROTOTYPE
This computer version is an evolving laboratory for the board game. Human matches, computer tournaments, and AI-assisted development help test which rules create real choices, which strategies endure, and where the game should change next.
INSPIRATION BEHIND THE NAME AND THE GAME
I’d wanted to make games since I was a kid. The path to Anisomorphic ran from homemade boards and role-playing systems to mathematics, language, and one central question: what changes when the rules themselves are allowed to move?
THE FIRST BOARD
When I was very young, I liked Monopoly—but I didn’t like that the bills were so small—so I decided to create my own game. It featured a much bigger board and, because I was fascinated by gemstones, properties with names such as Diamond Drive. Opal Overpass was a bridge that let players bypass entire parts of the board.
DEEP SYSTEMS
Starting in Grade 5, I created a sophisticated pen-and-paper role-playing game and kept developing it for years. Later, A Beautiful Mind and its depiction of John Nash developing his own Go-inspired game sharpened the ambition: create something strategically sophisticated while keeping its underlying rules relatively simple.
INVENTING A WORD
In The Information, James Gleick tells the remarkable story of the dictionary’s development, including the Oxford English Dictionary’s attempt to record every word created in the language. I loved the audacity of that project and thought it would be fun to invent a word—or several—that might one day earn a place in the dictionary.
CHANGING AXIOMS
While thinking about the foundations and philosophy of physics and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, I began questioning our use of fixed axioms. What if axioms changed as you traversed a system—allowing it to remain locally consistent and globally coherent without being globally consistent? I called these anisomorphic axioms: axioms that mutate to preserve local consistency and prevent self-referential contradictions.
MORE FROM MICHAEL
Michael explores strategy beyond the game too—from global systems and technology to investing, international living, and the future.
ENTER THE FIELD