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(cont.)
The exception is that the shortrange pieces in 3D GtS don't quickly offer
check, and white doesn't have an excessive first-move advantage. But I do
think I should only get a half-pass in this area, because about half the
pieces I use in higher-D games are 'infinite sliders', even if they are
effectively short range pieces, too. It's close enough to a legitimate
description of some of my stuff that I certainly can't argue too long and
hard:'not me!' 

Now, to start somewhere, David, I have a problem with high piece densities.
Take a simple 3D or 4D board - 6x6x6 or 4x4x4x4. Both are 'common', and
have over 200 squares. Why should they follow a semi-accidental feature of
a trio of very small chess games, and try to have somewhere between 40% and
50% starting piece density? I've found, with my own experiments in excess,
that very roughly 50 pieces is about all you really want per side. I've
tried 100, and it kinda sucks. Of course, I'm a minimalist in a lot of
ways, and I can see chess variants with 100 pieces per side and very
complex rules mimicking wargames, but there I'm discussing a rather
different thing, and not entirely a chess variant. 

Sticking to chess variants, an 8x8x8 or a 4x4x6x6, which I'm just looking
at, takes the number of 'squares' up to the 500-600 range. Now you're
talking maybe 150 pieces/side. How many different kinds of pieces does this
represent? How in heck are the players going to keep track of how all those
pieces move, much less what your opponent might do in 2-3 turns? To me, it
seems the game would bog down to long series of exchanges which would
reduce the pieces by 40-80%, then the players might start being able to
attack each other's royalty with a decent chance of success. Assuming they
could actually play the game reasonably well, and to grant that, we'd need
to explore the particulars a bit.

Charles Gilman, I'm waiting for one more shoe to drop before starting our
2-game playtest, assuming it's not a sabot. I'll let you know soon when
we can start.

It does appear there are at least 2 other people interested enough at this
time to post on 3D chess. I would be willing to organize a playtest for
both your games, Oskar and David, and anyone else who might want to
participate. This includes David's apparently only partly-conceptualized
game. Or, we could just discuss them. However you all want to play it. I'm
already doing a dual playtest/discussion on 4D games with Ben Reiniger,
and we're beta-testing Hyperchess while trying to make TessChess stable in
the opening - the problem you complained about earlier, David. Whoever's
interested, please comment.