Check out Grant Acedrex, our featured variant for April, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Kevin Pacey wrote on Sat, Feb 4, 2017 11:16 PM UTC:

Hi Joe

I had in mind nineteen 19 cell hex-shaped 2D hexagonal boards (peak width 5 cells, or in other words all 6 sides are 3 cells long), all arranged to form a hex-shaped 4D board. I even practised making one, using the Diagram Designer of CVP, though I had the same colouring scheme on all the 2D boards (to allow for facilitating 4D diagonal moves, I'd have to use a complex colouring scheme for the 4D board's 2D hexagonal boards, switching one of the colours about every 3rd board - that would have taken a couple more hours to do, I suppose). On 2D boards such as I described, knights move to 4 cells max. if staying on the same 2D board, or just to 3 cells (or to 0, if on the centre hex, oddly). Bigger 2D hex boards would be too unwieldy, I figured. Still, 361 cells in total is what I had for the 4D board, which is already a lot.

The problem I had (as I alluded to earlier) was trying to then visualize any half-decent setup where a knight couldn't check a king (or attack a queen, or undefended pawns) by force in one or two moves. That was using Hyperchess4 pieces & their movement rules as correspondingly on a 4D hexagonal board as I could (pawns excepted, perhaps) - i.e. an infeasible or unattractive sort of variant always resulting. The problems were even worse before that, when I tried using Balloon movement capable type pieces like in TessChess, or my 4*Chess variant. I'm pretty sure right now that with the 4D board dimensions I selected, the problems I mentioned will always arise regardless of the setup, at least as long as knights move as I wish them to (like for our 4D square cell boards).

I was just curious if a 4D hexagonal variant was feasible, and perhaps playable. At least 3D hexagonal variants have been done by other people & myself (looking at the 2D boards in my recent Hexagonal Raumschach variant CVP page might help a little in visualizing a smaller 2D hex shaped hexagonal board with its peak width = 5 cells). The only other sort of 4D hexagonal variant I've thought of would be a four 2D boards version of Alice Chess (e.g. using Glinski's Hexagonal Chess setup on one 2D board), but it wasn't anywhere near what I had in mind originally, and it has some issues too, though maybe they're not so bad. In any case, 4D variants never seem to win popularity contests, so I don't mind giving it a rest too much, at least for now. :)


Edit Form

Comment on the page Hyperchess4

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.