Kevin Pacey wrote on Sat, Feb 4, 2017 11:16 PM UTC:
Hi Joe
I had in mind nineteen 19 cell hex-shaped 2D hexagonal boards (peak width 5 cells, or in other words all 6 sides are 3 cells long), all arranged to form a hex-shaped 4D board. I even practised making one, using the Diagram Designer of CVP, though I had the same colouring scheme on all the 2D boards (to allow for facilitating 4D diagonal moves, I'd have to use a complex colouring scheme for the 4D board's 2D hexagonal boards, switching one of the colours about every 3rd board - that would have taken a couple more hours to do, I suppose). On 2D boards such as I described, knights move to 4 cells max. if staying on the same 2D board, or just to 3 cells (or to 0, if on the centre hex, oddly). Bigger 2D hex boards would be too unwieldy, I figured. Still, 361 cells in total is what I had for the 4D board, which is already a lot.
The problem I had (as I alluded to earlier) was trying to then visualize any half-decent setup where a knight couldn't check a king (or attack a queen, or undefended pawns) by force in one or two moves. That was using Hyperchess4 pieces & their movement rules as correspondingly on a 4D hexagonal board as I could (pawns excepted, perhaps) - i.e. an infeasible or unattractive sort of variant always resulting. The problems were even worse before that, when I tried using Balloon movement capable type pieces like in TessChess, or my 4*Chess variant. I'm pretty sure right now that with the 4D board dimensions I selected, the problems I mentioned will always arise regardless of the setup, at least as long as knights move as I wish them to (like for our 4D square cell boards).
I was just curious if a 4D hexagonal variant was feasible, and perhaps playable. At least 3D hexagonal variants have been done by other people & myself (looking at the 2D boards in my recent Hexagonal Raumschach variant CVP page might help a little in visualizing a smaller 2D hex shaped hexagonal board with its peak width = 5 cells). The only other sort of 4D hexagonal variant I've thought of would be a four 2D boards version of Alice Chess (e.g. using Glinski's Hexagonal Chess setup on one 2D board), but it wasn't anywhere near what I had in mind originally, and it has some issues too, though maybe they're not so bad. In any case, 4D variants never seem to win popularity contests, so I don't mind giving it a rest too much, at least for now. :)
Hi Joe
I had in mind nineteen 19 cell hex-shaped 2D hexagonal boards (peak width 5 cells, or in other words all 6 sides are 3 cells long), all arranged to form a hex-shaped 4D board. I even practised making one, using the Diagram Designer of CVP, though I had the same colouring scheme on all the 2D boards (to allow for facilitating 4D diagonal moves, I'd have to use a complex colouring scheme for the 4D board's 2D hexagonal boards, switching one of the colours about every 3rd board - that would have taken a couple more hours to do, I suppose). On 2D boards such as I described, knights move to 4 cells max. if staying on the same 2D board, or just to 3 cells (or to 0, if on the centre hex, oddly). Bigger 2D hex boards would be too unwieldy, I figured. Still, 361 cells in total is what I had for the 4D board, which is already a lot.
The problem I had (as I alluded to earlier) was trying to then visualize any half-decent setup where a knight couldn't check a king (or attack a queen, or undefended pawns) by force in one or two moves. That was using Hyperchess4 pieces & their movement rules as correspondingly on a 4D hexagonal board as I could (pawns excepted, perhaps) - i.e. an infeasible or unattractive sort of variant always resulting. The problems were even worse before that, when I tried using Balloon movement capable type pieces like in TessChess, or my 4*Chess variant. I'm pretty sure right now that with the 4D board dimensions I selected, the problems I mentioned will always arise regardless of the setup, at least as long as knights move as I wish them to (like for our 4D square cell boards).
I was just curious if a 4D hexagonal variant was feasible, and perhaps playable. At least 3D hexagonal variants have been done by other people & myself (looking at the 2D boards in my recent Hexagonal Raumschach variant CVP page might help a little in visualizing a smaller 2D hex shaped hexagonal board with its peak width = 5 cells). The only other sort of 4D hexagonal variant I've thought of would be a four 2D boards version of Alice Chess (e.g. using Glinski's Hexagonal Chess setup on one 2D board), but it wasn't anywhere near what I had in mind originally, and it has some issues too, though maybe they're not so bad. In any case, 4D variants never seem to win popularity contests, so I don't mind giving it a rest too much, at least for now. :)