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3-Dimensional Eight Level ChessA game information page
. TRUE 3D Chess on an 8 x 8 x 8 board.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Jared McComb wrote on Wed, Mar 22, 2006 04:42 PM UTC:
Link not broken.

Philip D. Wilson wrote on Tue, Mar 21, 2006 08:56 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
This looks very much like something I started developing in 1990-1991, but never felt I had finished. Apparently I was beat to the punch.

The approach to the Knights is the same, except that I intended to rename the 2nd & 3rd Knights to make them more readily distinguished from the traditional Cheval.

We came to the same conclusion on Pawns: that the best way to handle it is to keep the move purely straight forward, but let them attack in any of 8 directions, as this is dependent on opportunity.

The approach to layout is pretty close to what I've been thinking, but I'm leery of putting a piece with a full Bishop move in a corner.

Personally, I have reservations about the RookBishop, BishopMace, & RookMace. Do we really need a bunch of combined-move pieces? I'd rather have more Bishops, Rooks, & 'Maces' in those lines, or add one more kind of piece to take those 12 spots.

But yeah, this looks really familiar.


Iago wrote on Thu, May 6, 2004 04:43 AM UTC:
I have played competition-level chess myself for many years so I can claim
some measure of experience if not actual expertise.
It's fun to see people trying out new ways to 'invigorate' or
'rejuvenate' the game but this particular variation is SO incredibly
over the top that I wanted to offer one small observation why we maybe
should not bother:
A while ago I saw a variation where someone had created a 10x10 board
while only adding 3 or 4 new pieces [one was an extended version of the
knight residing in an off-the-board extra field. The designers had strived
to keep the rules governing these new pieces very limited and the game was
actually quite playable, they even created a program to play that kind of
chess, which worked very well and was very sensible. Very commendable
effort.
There was one factor however which effectively stopped it from ever being
adopted as a new way of playing chess. Playing the computer, even for a
scrappy game, took an unbelievable amount of moves. I ended up playing a
game of about 250 moves, and I meekly accept the software's imperfections
compounded by my own inexperience.
Anyone who has ever played chess will know that a 4 to 6 hour game would
come around to about 70-80 odd moves for each side in a VERY long game [as
an average, I'm not making any claims as to statistical accuracy here,
I'm only refering to 20 years of actual chess competition experience, you
will no doubt have a different experience].
Suppose a club were to seriously embrace this game and make the kind of
concerted effort of developing chess theory [because all the existing
theory - save for the basics about managing a game - goes out the window]
and training on this game, people would find themselves playing for VAST
amounts of time for a single game and long games would take well over 300
moves. It would be interesting to see how many actual moves you could make
in this scenario. Although manageable it would not actually be feasible to
have people play this game in a tournament because the tournament would
last several times the amount of time that it takes to play one now.

Now somebody developed a 3D game and because the original game is not
complex enough, they added new pieces with quaint rules AND differently
coloured squares distributed over -count 'em- 8 levels. If you overcame
all this and would devote some time getting comfortable with the game and
found someone willing to go through the same effort [which would be a
challenge all by itself] so that you would have someone to play, how many
moves would it take to play a single game when both players would make a
determined effort to win? How long would a single game take? How long
would a serious competition last? Who would want to play chess THAT bad
that a meaningful chunk of their life would be spent playing this game?

Just wondering.

If it is worth mentioning at all, the positive side would be that you
would probably need a quantum computer to compute the permutations. Which
leads me to the point that computers don't actually play chess, which is
outside the scope of this post so I'll shut up already.

Can't believe you made it this far down.

Charles Gilman wrote on Sat, Jun 21, 2003 06:48 AM UTC:Good ★★★★
Your array is certaily full of interesting patterns of (1) elemental radial
linepieces, (2) elemental oblique leapers, (3) combined pieces, as shown
below. Having equal numbers of similar kinds of piece is also clever.  The
castling is slightly odd because only it can be done with only half the
Rooks. The main difficulty is trying to set up this game with eight
standard sets of various sizes. Balancing sufficiently distinguishable
different pieces against sufficiently indistinguishable similar pieces is
hard. The size is also unwieldy. Perhaps the best thing is to make
oriental-style pieces by marking 11 sets of Draughts with at least
unridged side.
(1) /\	(2)/\/\	(3)\  /
   //\\	   \  /	    \/
   \\//	   /  \	    /\
    \/     \/\/	   /  \

Anonymous wrote on Thu, Apr 24, 2003 09:09 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
While much thought has gone into the design of this variant, the addition of SEVEN NEW pieces (from regular chess) with complicated rules of movement does not add to the game, in my opinion. Also, the Bishopmace on it's current plane of movement is queen, so 'projecting' this game onto a 2D board would not result in the current game of chess.

Tim Stiles wrote on Sun, Feb 16, 2003 08:09 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
great, if you ever get the time/patience to set up a board and pieces and play a game.

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