Hi Joe

I may not have what you think of as general goals, other than to say I'm trying to imagine on paper if any existing 4D square cell variants that I'm familiar with might have a feasible 4D Hexagonal analogue, using analoguous Hexagonal piece movement rules for a given 4D square cell variant. For now (for reasons I alluded to earlier, i.e. due to trial & error elimination) I'm concentrating on a 4D Hexagonal Hyperchess4 style analogue only. That is, with the non-pawn pieces moving like in Hyperchess4 as far as the 4D board goes, but using Glinski's Hexagonal Chess piece movement rules when moving the pieces on a 2D board (except for the bishops, which are allowed to shift a cell orthogonally, as in Hyperchess4). When it comes to moving between 2D boards, I'm moving the pieces like in Hyperchess4 (i.e to same cell on a different board, except for the knights at times).

I've experimented with different setups and pawn rules (right now preferring them to be close to Glinski's, even when moving between 2D boards). At the moment I have a (slightly[?] ugly) setup that's close to working, or actually does work, but I need to check it a lot to feel more sure. The first objection I had to a similar setup was that the White queen could force a possibly irritating 4D diagonal check in just two moves. I think by rearranging the pawns in that setup I may have solved that, though the setup's arguably uglier, but it is at least symmetrical, except for the K & Q positions, as is always unavoidable in a variant with just one K & Q per side. Otherwise, it has 17 pawns, with a pawn on the rear hex on three out of the four 2D boards with pawns and/or pieces for each side. That's with 9 pieces per side (an extra B compared to Hyperchess4, but currently there isn't going to be one starting out on each of the three basic hex colours). Sorry I don't seem to have clear general goals, though by just trying to fiddle with existing 4D square cell variants and make them work in 4D hexagonal, I hope to avoid a lot more trial and error (and thinking) then if I were to first brainstorm for some greater sort of general goals from scratch. One thing I could reconsider, if it seems helpful to me, would be the shape of my 2D Hexagonal boards, and/or the the whole 4D setup for these boards that I'm using, but for now I'd like these both to be hex shaped, like a Glinski's Hexagonal Chess board is.

If and when I have a setup (plus tentative rules) that seems to make for a variant that's at all feasible, I'll try to judge if it's possibly playable from start to finish in practice too, such as by the guidelines in Fergus' article on what makes for a good variant (e.g. having offence favoured somewhat over defence). At the moment I'm strongly thinking of just using that bared king confinement rule for a Hyperchess4 4D Hexagonal analogue that I wrote of earlier, rather than a 'held' rule as in Hyperchess4, to allow for 'basic' mates vs. a bare king. One day soon I may post a test diagram for it, before thinking of submitting it as a variant, though such a complex diagram takes some hours to make using the CVP Diagram Designer, and lately I've had a lot of eye strain after using my computers any length of time, so I don't want to really overdo things for a while. In the old days my father's Digital computer monitors brought home from work had tinted covers for screens, but no such luck for the often 'abominable' modern PCs I've gotten over the years, as my old man (& another old computer guy I knew) put it, compared to what they could have been had history been different (maybe Apple PCs are better? I don't know).