Comments by benr

See also 'Joust', described here
http://www.chessvariants.org/programs.dir/joust.html
and with Friedlander applet here
http://play.chessvariants.org/erf/Joust.html

(In Joust, the question as to whether the knights can capture one another is interesting.  If yes, only one player has this option and thus an advantage (?); but if no, one player has an additional blocking ability that the other does not.)

Joust is interesting from a mathematical combinatorial game theory perspective, as it should be solvable with enough thought/force.  Knight Chase introduces an extra element of droppable markers and a time limit, which should make mathematical statements more difficult.

First, if in the position the white builder were at d4 instead, then that rook move would remove the check, right?

I agree tha the builder is too strong; at least for a start it would make sense to disallow the builder trying to swap out the king.  (After all, you could never successfully switch them!)  It would still have the awesome power of resurrecting your pieces, plus capture by adjacency, but no direct checking power.

I really like the idea here.  It looks like there are 20 types of cards, 5
of each type.  Each game takes two types for the starting decks, another 4
types for the basic set (in every game), and another 10 types in addition. 
This means each game uses 10 out of 14 possible 'extension' cards.  I
feel like it would be better to have a greater variety of cards available
(as in say Dominion) for more randomness and replayability.

Anyway, I'll probably end up buying the game regardless.  Maybe expansion
sets are in order?

Yes, the rules need to be clarified a bit.  It sounds though like each
piece moves as usual within each level, and steps to a corresponding square
in either of the adjacent levels (excepting pawns, which could only move in
one direction).

I'm happy to chat about the game, but I warn you that I tend to really
prefer games that treat the third (or fourth) dimension equally to the
first two.  Also, I'm in Illinois, so it will have to be restricted to
internet correspondence.

Your king restriction rule reminds me of the one in Joe's 4D game, but
with a twist.  Intriguing.

I also enjoy the historical notes.  I would be very interested to hear
about something noteworthy happening 500 years ago.  I don't think these
notes need to be generated every day, but every now and then is nice.

The knight here has of course just two moves in its lifetime.  Dropping a knight becomes a tricky subject (although I suppose in my few Shogi games I rarely want to drop a knight).

I assume the proposed promotion zone is the last hyperrank?

I think I would suggest different diagonal movement in this game.  As many of the Shogi pieces see 'forward' differently than 'sideways', it is perhaps better to keep track of the two 'forwards' and the two 'sideways' directions in this 4D board.  In particular, I think the moves from center square Bb2ii should probably not include Bb3iii, nor any of the extended diagonal forward&back like Bb1iii.

I also think that there's a possibility that king restriction (beyond eliminating tri- and quad-ragonals) is unnecessary.  This board is so compact that the dense moves of the generals, the enemy king, and especially an enemy dragon king or dragon horse could force mate.  (In fact, if 3- and 4-diagonals were included, a dragon on the center square sees everywhere.)

(And Charles, Daniil's sentence is fine with the omission of those commas and replacing 'which' by 'that' (a grammatical technicality not recognized by most).  I think such cells will occur infrequently enough to not warrant a universal name; one needs a particularly asymmetric piece to have any such squares.)

The main distraction for me as far as layout is the bulleting.  Using html bulleting would be considerably more readable.  Also the headers would be a bit nicer in the cv standard format, and I agree that the long spaces after diagrams is irksome; I don't know why a red line would come about when deleting that space...

I haven't really read through the entire thing, but I find the snippets I have read to be fine text-wise.  (I understand renaming standard pieces for thematic/historical purposes; however, I too find it harder to read the result.)

I was reading over the Tetrahedral Chess page a while back, and decided to
understand the statement that certain (skew) planes form hexagonal
chessboards.  I can confirm now that this is true, and Gilman's M&B even
enumerates the number of such planes through each cell.

Now note that the 4-coloring of Tetrahedral Chess lends all four of its
colors to these hex-boards.  I cannot recall finding a hex chess that uses
a four-colored board.

However, a longer period of time ago, I noticed that the hex board can be
thought of as a certain quotient (that's a technical math term in this
context) of a 3d cubic board along a single unicorn line.  (For those not
used to the math lingo, think of it as an optical illusion: you look at the
cubic board so as to line up opposite corners, and all cells along your
line of sight are treated as being equivalent.)  This quotienting does some
weird things with the pieces, but what about the colors?  The only obvious
coloring that could be maintained by this quotient is the unicorn's
4-binding!  It probably comes as no shock that this coloring is the same as
in Tetrahedral Chess (how many 4-colorings can there be of a hex board?)

I think furthermore that some of the pieces in Tetrahedral chess, when
restricted to one of the hex-planes, turn out to be very similar to the
cubic pieces modulo the unicorn's diagonal.  (I had worked some of this
out, but don't have the notes handy.)

I agree that we should look for a continuum; probably the best approach is to decide upon several factors (like the Muller 7) that can be reasonably easily computed for different games.  What is perhaps lacking from the Muller7 is a measure for which aspects are most important (perhaps it is just equally weighted, but I think they should not be).  The ultimate goal (IMO) is for the measurements to come as close as possible to our collective opinion of what is 'chesslike'.  (See also Joyce's 'Chess Space', on the wikidot as well as in some comments here I believe.)

A couple of examples that might be helpful to keep in mind:
1) games using chess pieces that are not chesslike in gameplay: Joust (not very chesslike), or Knightsweeper (not chesslike at all) [both on this site]
2) Lennert's 'For the Crown' (half chess, half something else)
3) already mentioned, but Go and Checkers (and their variants; Gess perhaps?)
4) other games that are clearly not 'chesslike' but that have similarities should be noted; these might help weight the characteristics.

If 'chesslike' is not well defined enough, maybe it's useful to think in the following way.  If you wanted to tell a friend about this game, is it easier to say 'It's like chess, but...' or just to start from another game (or from nothing at all)?  Of course, some games will be equally easy to start from chess or to start from some other game (e.g., For the Crown seems easier to describe as 'like Dominion, but with chess', but maybe for some people, 'like chess, but with deck building' is better).

Oh, and maybe it's good to distinguish between a theoretical classification and guidelines for this site.  I tend to think this site should be very inclusive, but am happy to draw the boundaries tighter in theoretical talks.

Not sure if this really belongs as a comment on this page, but here goes.
Raumshach is a bit like a diagonal game, but in higher dimensions diagonal starts to have different meanings (the colloquial 'triagonal', etc.)  I've taken to giving the number of dimensions that are 'lateral' versus those that are 'attacking'.  So Raumschach is 1-lateral and 2-attacking.  Some of the very large 3D (8x8x8) variants are 2-lateral and 1-attacking.  Most 4D variants are 2-lat and 2-att.  Ordinary chess is 1-lat and 1-att, whereas Diagonal chess is 0-lat and 2-att.

I generally like the idea.  I think the inventor shouldn't rate the game;
if they want to mention what they think of the game, it should go into the
page somewhere (in the introduction would be good).  I'm a little worried
about rating games when they are themed or experimental: for instance, my
only game is 4D, so probably not a good candidate for frequent play, but
(IMO of course) it is a very good setup as far as 4D games go.  Should it
get rated in the former sense or the latter?  Maybe the frequency of play
question will serve this purpose too, but maybe there should be a third
rating?  (So 'good game', 'interesting', and 'often played'?)

I like the text itself.  It's formatted to take up less than half of my
screen's width though, and I prefer the current page's full span.

Maybe this is premature, but I have some comments for the login box.  It
would be nice if it said something if you fail to log in; I think right now
it just refreshes the page without any message.  It might also be useful to
have a link to register for the pages in the same box.