Enter Your Reply The Comment You're Replying To Joe Joyce wrote on Sun, Apr 4, 2010 03:32 PM UTC:Alicing represents an extreme form of limiting the size of a dimension, which is a very common method of controlling higher dimensional games. But I think it can easily go too far. Take boards of sizes 8x8x2 or 6x6x3, for example. These are a pair of 3D boards that have a common flaw, in my opinion. They are too narrow in one dimension. A dimension of size 2 or 3 is too small to give the standard chesspieces enough scope to move as themselves. These narrow dimensions are in some senses more gimmick than full higher-dimensional boards. My rough rule of thumb is that a dimension of length L [Length of side in squares] should be large enough that a knight placed on a 2D LxL sized board can move from any square on that board to any other square on that board. This gives a minimum size of 4 for any dimension used. Admittedly, that's personal prejudice, and I've used smaller boards myself. Learned a good bit from using different boards, including the bit about liking the knight to be able to move freely. In the games with less than all sides of length 4, the knight does not have full x-dimensional freedom. And of all the standard chesspieces, the knight is the most beautiful in higher dimensions. Raumschach uses a board of 5x5x5, 125 positions, double the standard 64 of FIDE. This is more than big enough for free knight moves, and it also seems like a lot of places to move to, but it's not, really. Look at it this way - from the center, a king, using 3D movement, can move to any square on the board in 2 turns. On a standard FIDE 8x8 2D board, it's 4 turns, so in that sense, the FIDE board is twice the size of the Raumschach. And that size difference means a lot, because the smaller the board, the worse the edge effects. Edit Form You may not post a new comment, because ItemID Higher D chess does not match any item.