Enter Your Reply The Comment You're Replying To Joe Joyce wrote on Wed, Jan 16, 2008 06:32 AM UTC:George, I looked at all your examples, and the conclusion I come to is that you are a 'lumper' and I am a 'splitter'. I see your categories [as exemplified by your suggested list of games 'similar enough' to Alice] as far too overbroad. I would have to think you'd say mine are too narrow. I see the forced level change - 'every turn, every piece' - as a major influence on the game, or any game that's 'Alice'd'. What other 3D game makes the knights colorbound? Colorbound Alice knights are to a great extent an artifact of an even number of board levels; knights are not necessarily colorbound in Alice games with an odd number of levels. [The final determining factor is whether the levels are wrap-around or not.] And that involuntary 'step-across' weakens all the other pieces, too. It is generally the case that, compared with FIDE, when a piece moves in Alice, it must have an extra empty square available beyond what FIDE requires, thus being more easily blocked. Piece density is lower and square connectivity is higher, making things comparatively harder to guard... and so on. The design I offer tries to address all these issues in various ways, and it keeps true to the key idea: forced level change, every piece, every turn. It uses shortrange pieces, an idea tried out in Alice Modern Shatranj, and in the Zillions TSRP release, with several shatranj variations. These showed shortrange pieces work well in an Alice environment, which is different than a standard 3D environment - somewhat the same way as leaping chess [where pieces are captured by being leapt over, with the capturing piece landing on the immediately following square, which must be empty for the move to take place] is different from FIDE. While I hope everyone really likes my stuff, I realize some will not. Enjoy, or not, Joe Edit Form You may not post a new comment, because ItemID Directed Alice does not match any item.