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Joe Joyce started this thread by commenting: 'What happens is that the game becomes chaotic; players have no way to forecast the state of the board even a few turns in advance because there are so many possible moves.' Another complex shortrange piece is the Hippogriff, which can leap (1,1,2) to 24 different cells in the 6x6x6 variant Monster 3D Chess.

SOME NOTES ON LARGE VARIANTS: my ideas for a 6x6x6 variant started with comments in the old 3-D Chess thread. Placing 16 White Pawns on the second level and 16 to 20 other White Pieces on the first level results in 64 to 72 pieces on 216 cells, which seems like a reasonable 3D density. Dai Shogi appears to have 130 pieces on 225 squares. Joe Joyce once put 64 pieces on the 256 cells of a sort of 4-D game.

'Edge effects cripple diagonal pieces, reducing the number of cells they can reach compared to starting in the center, but don't affect orthogonal pieces at all in that way.' writes Joe on April 5. Even on a 6x6x6 board, with 152 'edge cells' and 64 'interior cells', the Unicorn remains a weak piece, worth perhaps 40 percent of a Knight. I now prefer giving each army four Unicorns, serving as expendable units, similar to the Alfils in Shatranj.