Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Parton's Alice weakens the two sides in a number of ways, one of which is
reducing the starting piece density from 50% to 25%. Adding a third board
and changing nothing else would reduce that starting density to under 17%.
Rather than add pieces on the other boards to bring up the starting
density, which blocks pieces traveling between boards, add pieces to the
starting board, where all the pieces are already. One way to do this:
expand the board[s] to 10x10, which gives us room for 30 pieces/side and 4
empty ranks between armies. Now, everyone will have their own opinion of
what those pieces should be, and you are all free to chime in, in fact,
you're invited.  

I'll start, unless someone has already beaten me to it, of course. :D
Add several short range pieces. An interesting class to use is the
inclusive compound pieces. This gives another choice. A piece that steps
one square and/or leaps 2 squares, in either order, can change boards
once, at the complete end of its move, or twice, once after each complete
step of the compound move. Leave this choice up to the player, and you've
made the game more interesting and those pieces a bit stronger.

Joe, Good luck with your new short range project.  On a somewhat related
note: BordahBee; BordahBee Doppelganger Extreme, and Split Phase Tri-chess
also involving piece transfers to other boards.

Joe Joyce's 'invention' here is old hat, ''so yesterday'' for Alice
Chess, certainly creative enough for its time. There are number of spinoffs already, easy to find by conscientious researcher, on mediocre-playing Alice. Touting my own first here, as customary among modern prolificists, year 2004 '3D Positional Chess' fits the bill in having multiple boards interacting. 'Alice-like' 3D Positonal Chess discloses 8x8x2 2 boards, 7x7x3 3 boards (147 squares), 6x6x4 4 boards (144 squares) for pieces to transfer among upon promotion -- the novelty. Offhand Joyce's so many as 192 squares would be especially unplayable with short-range pieces, arbitrarily limited to 2 or 3 squares. The unpalatable oversizing is reminiscent of that author's recent poor Chieftain Chess, exactly 192 too. Invariably, well-intentioned good-natured, unoriginal 'designer' Joe Joyce will ignore prior art called to attention, so we leave it at 3D Positional Chesses.

Hey, Gary, thanks! I do see a version of Alice with short range pieces and
3 10x10 boards. Although 4-square pieces are more medium range on a 10x10,
which is nice - it allows short, medium, and long range pieces. I see
players trying to set up clusters of pieces as attack forces on different
boards and also trying to set up 'safe havens', connected areas on two
or three boards, where a king or other piece can come for protection. I
like all the possible interactions, and think it'd be a fun game. [Heck,
I even have a preset I'd like to try out - and it does have rooks,
bishops, knights, kings and pawns in it.] 
But this is a toss-out idea on the feasibility of 3-board directed Alice.
I hope others will find it interesting and offer their own suggestions
about Alice mods or 3-board piece sets. 
It's a proposal for a modest Alice variant that hasn't been officially
written up and submitted. Has it been done before? [ie: is it worth
writing up and doing rules for a preset or so?] I offered the expanded
geometry and player-choice of 'Parton direction' [if you don't mind me
adding another 'Parton' to the discussion] along with a question about
what has been done along these lines before. I thought I saw something on
Alice variants a while back, but didn't see anything on a first look.
[Possibly what I saw or read about was an Alice'd 3D game?] 
And for my parton' comment, 'Good-bye for now' ;-) Enjoy!

Alice Cubed, invented by L. Lynn Smith, is a 3D extrapolation of V.R.Parton's Alice Chess. Played within two 4x4x4 cubes (thus 128 cells). Can be found on the Zillions web site.

See Alice-Raumschach for a game played on two 5x5x5 cubes. Actually, the Zillions Rule File uses pieces in four colors on a single cube.

Hey, George, missed your previous reply. I see we were thinking along the
same lines about 3D. Thanks for the reference; can you, or anyone, offer
any more? [Later:] David, thank you for mentioning LL Smith's game - he
generally does good stuff - and the other one. No one has used the
directed bit, or double-step pieces yet, that anyone at all know about? 

On Positional 3D Chess: I believe the ideas expressed in Directed Alice
differ significantly enough from P3D that there isn't significant
overlap. The operating concepts behind the designs are totally different.
The pieces, where they start, how they move, all are different enough that
the 2 games share at most the basic elements of a 3D board and a starting
point in Alice, apparently. 

I think Alice, like Ultima, is a breakthrough game that is excellent in
scope and concept, and just might have a tiny flaw or so. It deserves to
have some spin-offs. Its essence is not that of just another 3D game. My
minor variations just try to give a new slant on a great concept.

Finally, I say again, the proof of the game is in its play, nowhere else.
If anyone [anyone at all...] is interested, this is the URL for my current
setup:
/play/pbm/play.php?game%3DDirected+Alice+Chess+III%26settings%3DDirAl3
Of the non-FIDE pieces, the bishopy and rookish can be found in
Short/Falcon King Chess [CVwiki] and the linear hero and shaman in
Chieftain chess. The FIDE queen has been replaced by the linear hero and
shaman's queen-analog, that combo piece which moves one and/or jumps two
orthogonally or diagonally. The guard is the standard non-royal,
moves-like-a-king, man. The rest are pure FIDE. Oh, yeah, almost forgot -
the board is 300 squares [I like those round numbers.]

Alice is nothing but 3D with compulsory change of level, so many 3Ds
indexed in CVPage, out of 200, are really already Alice copycats after
1950s. Most Mutators are a worsening because of increasing complexity.
Offhand also, Antoine Fourriere's Chessma 84 (2002), many Gilman's like
Tardis Taijitu (2006), Betza's article starting with 'Alice...', and
especially 'inspired by Alice Chess' Jim Aiken's Tandem-84 (2002). 
Infinite possibilites and infinite problems in 3D where nothing has been
proven to be correct.  Philosopher's Chess and Pocket Polypiece are
isomorphic with Alice-types, according to definition, by thinking of
change of modality as switch to a different, second board, half or so the
pieces staying the same and half changing.

George, I looked at all your examples, and the conclusion I come to is that
you are a 'lumper' and I am a 'splitter'. I see your categories [as
exemplified by your suggested list of games 'similar enough' to Alice]
as far too overbroad. I would have to think you'd say mine are too
narrow. 

I see the forced level change - 'every turn, every piece' - as a major
influence on the game, or any game that's 'Alice'd'. What other 3D
game makes the knights colorbound? Colorbound Alice knights are to a great
extent an artifact of an even number of board levels; knights are not
necessarily colorbound in Alice games with an odd number of levels. [The
final determining factor is whether the levels are wrap-around or not.] 

And that involuntary 'step-across' weakens all the other pieces, too. It
is generally the case that, compared with FIDE, when a piece moves in
Alice, it must have an extra empty square available beyond what FIDE
requires, thus being more easily blocked. Piece density is lower and
square connectivity is higher, making things comparatively harder to
guard... and so on. 

The design I offer tries to address all these issues in various ways, and
it keeps true to the key idea: forced level change, every piece, every
turn. It uses shortrange pieces, an idea tried out in Alice Modern
Shatranj, and in the Zillions TSRP release, with several shatranj
variations. These showed shortrange pieces work well in an Alice
environment, which is different than a standard 3D environment - somewhat
the same way as leaping chess [where pieces are captured by being leapt
over, with the capturing piece landing on the immediately following
square, which must be empty for the move to take place] is different from
FIDE. While I hope everyone really likes my stuff, I realize some will
not. 

Enjoy, or not,
Joe

Right, Joyce's work to date as  whole is 'Below Average' at about 3.5
out of 10.0, for lack of citing other related work.  Studied
simultaneously in 2007, we found Gilman and Gifford mention designers'
CVs at least 2/3 the time, whereas Joyce does so once in 20 separate
games' write-ups, as if in vacuo. Other reasoning of course rates
Gilman's and Gifford's well within Good Category, 6.0 to 7.9, themes for
example.  We even recently rated all 39 CVPage 'Recognized' under thread
'ChessboardMath' and came up with (only) 7.1 average. They took time to
evaluate, whereas yesterday's list of art after Alice by creators Betza,
myself, Aiken, Fourriere was made quickly as favour, meant to CONTRAST or
compare. So self-absorbed, it is surprising Joyce is even acknowledging
V.R. Parton's Alice Chess this thread for between-two-board enforced
movements. Any effort to place one's work is appreciated by CVPage's
1000 contributors, and their better tries cannot be in vain.  Even extreme
difference from prior art is illustrative. Now Joyce expatiates on 'Alice
Modern Shatranj'.  What is that, one wonders? We have to ferret out that
Modern Shatranj is Joyce CV(of course), average in potential playability,
and so 'AMS' is  two-board Alice form of it. Hopefully, Joyce writes up
any and all new Alice-inspired Rules-sets, as surely as we oblige to Rate
them.

Lol, George! I must be expiating my sins from a past life... a little
exaggeration here? 'One citation'! 'What is Alice Modern Shatranj?'
Good Lord! Not even I could be that bad, George. So I started checking my
citations... ['Aikin's Chesseract, Capa's, Freeling's Grand, Duniho's
Fusion, Jagger's PiRaTeKnIkS, Gilman's 'unnamed game', and others, I
realized I left one out, Abbott's Ultima, for SpaceWar, so I corrected
that. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. I could indeed put more
citations into my work. For example, I could have mentioned Betza's name
specifically in CwDA: the Shatranjian Shooters, that Abdul-Rahman Sibahi
and I did, but I felt that the 'CwDA' as the first word [so to speak] in
the name of the game was ample, if shorthand, info on where the game's
origins were. As far as Alice Modern Shatranj, following is the
description copied from the CVPages pointer to the zrf for the ShortRange
Project. A brief note on the zrfs - they were done by my partner on the
project, Christine Bagley-Jones.


'Description 
The ShortRange Project is a joint effort from Christine Bagley-Jones and
Joe Joyce. There are five zrf's contained within, as follows.
 1. HyperModern Shatranj (2 variants)
 2. HyperModern Great Shatranj (4 variants)
 3. LongRange ShortRange piece Mix (4 variants)
 4. Shatranj 10x8 (2 variants)
 5. Alice Shatranj (20 variants)
You can download this game from zillions site via this link.'

I could go on, but it's silly [even moreso than I am]. I suppose I should
correct any gross distortions in your characterizations of my work, but
have at me. You have asked for a write up for this Alice variant; if my
write up is as generous as your ratings of my write ups, then it will be
very short indeed, lol. I floated the basis, if not a synopsis, of a write
up in these Directed Alice comments. I also asked if it should be written
up. Since Gary, who seemed in favor, wished me luck, and you, not in
favor, asked for a write up, I will do one, by popular demand. In the
meantime, keep rippin' me up, dude; rumor has it that some find it funny.
And there needs to be more humor in the game-design community, don't you
think? ;-)

Enjoy,
Joe