Enter Your Reply The Comment You're Replying To Joe Joyce wrote on Fri, Oct 10, 2008 03:05 PM UTC:Rich asks if there is a Track 1.5, between tracks 1 and 2. Well, that may be somewhat debatable, but I'd like to walk down to the other end of the platform, to Track 9&3/4. One of the 'fringe' areas in which I know of very little work being done is that of 'giant' pieces. Koksal Karakus designed Giant Chess, which uses a chesspiece [the Dev] that covers 4 squares on the board, in a 2x2 area. There is a wall piece that covers 2 adjacent squares. I'm sure there are other such pieces, but here I'd like to consider a 'giant chesspiece' that is composed of several common chess pieces. Unlike other tries, this 'piece' has one unit that acts as the 'king' for the entire multi-unit piece. Kill the 'king' and the 'piece' is dead, even if bits of its corpse still remain [immobile] on the board. Call the king a brain unit, make a rule that no part [individual unit] of the 'piece' can move without being in direct contact with the brain, use 3 or more different kinds of chesspieces as units, and you have a large piece that can seem to move across the board almost like it was alive. Why bother? Well, it gives the concepts of chesspiece 'powers' and hit points a whole new meaning. You want a piece that can attack at a distance? Put bishops or rooks into it; they can 'fire' out of the piece across the board to capture. They may well be 'one-shot' pieces if used this way, but if you can pick off an enemy brain with one shot, and without exposing your own brain units, it can be very worth it. As far as 'hit points', that's just the number of units in a piece. And power is easily seen then as what kind of units are [remaining] in the multi-square piece. To do this right needs big boards, which is why I suggested the 12x16 board. Because there are 2 levels of organization, there are 2 ways to look at the number of chesspieces in the game. On the lower level, there are 32 pieces per side. On the higher level, there are 4. Each of the 4 is composed of about 8 units, is all. Enjoy. Edit Form You may not post a new comment, because ItemID Track 2 does not match any item.