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Thanks, Jean-Louis, I appreciate your assistance. I will have to dig up my version of Pritchard and look up Maack. Apologies for the slow reply; a combination of health issues slowed me down considerably last month.

I'm not surprised Maack's version "failed to recruit players". My version of 4x4x4x4 was deliberately designed to make it as easy to play as possible. I'm not seeing hordes of players clamoring to play it.

I'm not seeing hordes of players clamoring to play it.

I'm not really expecting a lot of people on this one either. I still hope to build the playspace, but I'll expect a long wait before finding someone to play with me. (Crazier things have happened, though.)

I wish you good luck, and great fortune in finding a suitable opponent. I found it quite difficult, and finding the minimum number of pieces to force mate was even more difficult. Ben Reiniger put up with my fumbling around pushing pieces until I realized it required the lone king vs king and 2 major pieces from the 1 queen and 2 bishops (bishops and rooks essentially exchanging roles when going from FIDE to my 4D game) and a specific alignment of the 4 pieces, which can also be forced. The advantage to my method is that it demonstrates a forced mate on any-sized 2D boards. Most 4D games cannot do that. Once you get past a 5x5 2D board, you can no longer use the trick of putting your king in the middle of the gameboard and then using a ridiculously powerful 4D queen placed between your king and the opponent's king to pin that king against the side of the board in mate. If the 2D boards are 6x6 or larger, that tactic does not work, because the opponent king has another row of squares to which it can retreat and get out of check.

Build the playspace. Make at least 1 physical board so you can push pieces. A physical game makes things more real. I believe using a physical board makes teaching and learning at least a little bit easier. And with 4D variants, the easier you can make it, the better, unless your goal is for no one to ever play the game. However, making a physical game for demo and experimenting with is worthwhile, I've found. Sometimes you can suck people into making a few moves in the game. And when you have physical components, you can use anything else you have handy to look at ideas far afield from chess.

I've found that the basic 4D board has uses in many games besides chess. I've designed a wargame, a trading game, and an empire-building game, a "3X" game, not quite a 4X game since all points on the board are already known at the beginning of the game so there is no eXploration, just eXpansion, eXploitation, and eXtermination. All of these games are played on a "simple 4D board". I don't necessarily tell people that when they first play. But they should notice that on a larger than normal board, it is rather easy to get from any one location on the board to any other. There are more ways to get from here to there than in 2D or 3D.

Happy designing!

Hi, Kevin. Extreme concentration can be very useful in game design, but it's not so useful when running night operations, especially when you're running an entire shift. It's constant interruptions, which destroyed my ability to do serious, CYA paperwork... yeah, I worked in a bureaucracy. So now I can get interrupted, but have found another odd ability useful for game design. I do a lot of the design work subconsciously.

My 4D variant was something I worked on for years since school, and never managed a satisfactory result. I went through all sorts of pieces, used ridiculous numbers of pawns, once looking at 2 rows of 16 pawns. One day, after decades, I suddenly "saw" - like I was looking at it right there in front of me - the game pieces set up for a game. That told me what pieces were needed, and where they and the pawns were set up. The image was beautiful and perfect... just not quite complete. I got all this with no rules. They took me a fair amount of time and some help to get, but I got a good result in everything except the number of people who play it.

The next 2 games I saw set up and ready to play, right next to each other, were Great and Grand Shatranj. They came with rules, though, so my subconscious learned! However, what I consider clearly my best chess variant, the Battle of Macysburg, was the result of extreme concentration carried out over a few years of time. I could "feel" a good wargame in Chieftain Chess, but it was not close or obvious how to get there. I literally iterated my way through dozens of games to get from Chieftain to Macysburg, with the invaluable aid of my developer. Try to get a good playtest partner to work with. Mine helped me turn chess back into a wargame.

And finally, for a very odd "superpower", I could hear ultrasonic noises at about 40k Hz, which meant I could hear some ultrasonic traffic signal controls, and also some store security systems. There was 1 store I could not enter because the screeching was painfully loud to me. Another, not quite as bad, I followed along the sonic beam right to an emitter hidden behind a rack of clothes. I moved the clothes to make sure, and saw it actually sticking out from the wall. Thankfully I have either aged out of that ability or everyone is using infrared or something else instead of ultrasonics!