Jean-Louis, is there an available copy of Maack's and/or Dawson's work? I didn't turn anything up from an online search.
Apologies, Bob, for dragging other designers' 4D games onto your page. But 4D variants are an interesting topic, with little available information, and both Ben R. and I are interested in 4D variants and we've each done at least one. Grin, I see that unlike me, you were not aiming for extreme playability.
The norm seems to be the 4x4x4x4 board. Dale Holmes did a 5x5x5x5 version and posted it in the wiki, but it no longer exists there. I found V.R. Parton's 4D Sphinx Chess to be surprisingly timid for him. The individual 2D 4x4 boards that make up most 4D boards are present, but in a 3x3 array, rather than 4x4. To me, individual 4x4 2D boards scream for a full 4x4 array, not Parton's setup. I originally felt that this was a lack of imagination, but lately I've been wondering if he did it deliberately for playability.
One problem I was concerned about was how chaotic a game could become in just a few moves. When a game has "infinite sliders" and short range leapers coupled with both a larger board and several additional ways to go when moving to an adjacent location, things can get quickly crazy, with pieces appearing almost randomly across the board. The knight has a move which translates perfectly to 4D. Allowing it to jump also makes it a killer piece, literally! Even forcing it to slide 2+1 or 1+2 without the
leap still means the knight has 2 paths to its target square.
Jean-Louis, is there an available copy of Maack's and/or Dawson's work? I didn't turn anything up from an online search.
Apologies, Bob, for dragging other designers' 4D games onto your page. But 4D variants are an interesting topic, with little available information, and both Ben R. and I are interested in 4D variants and we've each done at least one. Grin, I see that unlike me, you were not aiming for extreme playability.
The norm seems to be the 4x4x4x4 board. Dale Holmes did a 5x5x5x5 version and posted it in the wiki, but it no longer exists there. I found V.R. Parton's 4D Sphinx Chess to be surprisingly timid for him. The individual 2D 4x4 boards that make up most 4D boards are present, but in a 3x3 array, rather than 4x4. To me, individual 4x4 2D boards scream for a full 4x4 array, not Parton's setup. I originally felt that this was a lack of imagination, but lately I've been wondering if he did it deliberately for playability.
One problem I was concerned about was how chaotic a game could become in just a few moves. When a game has "infinite sliders" and short range leapers coupled with both a larger board and several additional ways to go when moving to an adjacent location, things can get quickly crazy, with pieces appearing almost randomly across the board. The knight has a move which translates perfectly to 4D. Allowing it to jump also makes it a killer piece, literally! Even forcing it to slide 2+1 or 1+2 without the leap still means the knight has 2 paths to its target square.