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Charles Gilman wrote on Sun, Sep 4, 2011 06:54 AM UTC:
'You often say 'pentagonal' or 'pentagonal prism' as a board shape. These should probably be 'hexagonal' and 'hexagonal prism'. Regular pentagons don't tile the plane.'

No, but irregiular ones do - see here. Hexagonal geometries - abbreviated to hex over much of the Chess Variant Pages including Man and Beast, are relatively orthodox and do have long straight lines of radial steps. It is the pentagonal geometries that lack them and therefore have so few straight pieces.

''Al fil' is Arabic for 'the elephant'. I should know --- I speak Hebrew, where 'pil' (somewhere between 'peel' and 'pill' in pronunciation) means elephant, and Hebrew is very closely related to Arabic.'

I considered this fact well enough known among Chess variant enthusiasts not to repeat, but perhaps I should add it to the notes.


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