I'd like to be able to blame Hugh for this, after his comment on my recent Pythagoras post, but I think really I just had to produce a graphic to punish myself for losing my 1970s photo. This is how my Glinski-based (accidentally Glinski-based...) Tri-Chess game looked.
I actually built a set, albeit with very cheap, nasty, unweighted plastic pieces (all we could afford in them days, Pet). It was spectacular, but the game itself was sadly flawed - brave but ill-judged, like Babbage's pocket calculator, Cross-Country Billiards and other fleeting glories which history has consigned to File 13. The physical set disappeared long ago, though I remember throwing out the board relatively recently - might even have been in this Century.
Please don't ask me about the rules. It is still a sore point, and I shall just smile mysteriously. No, I do not regard this Grand Folly as clever - merely further evidence that I am basically a moonbeam.
Well! Who opened that can of worms...you or me?!
ReplyDeleteAnswering you breakfast pondering first; That's why you need the extra boards after the four, the board needs to be 31x31. Now, like an idiot (I am clinically an idiot/genius now!) while I had Googled chess boards while thinking of Triangular boards I hadn't thought to Google Scrabble boards...
...I have now. There is an official large version 21x21 called Super Scrabble (Super Scrabble), while somebody else has done a 31x31 but he's gone way over the top with coloured squares (Super Duper Scrabble), and you would need an IQ of 150 with a degree in applied mathematics to score late game sneekies, the added tiles (400 against the 200 of the Super) would leave the board a tad crowded. Also $300 dollars seems a lot for a screen-printed IKEA side-grain chopping-board!!
I'm looking at about 320 tiles, and while I'll probably end up with a fourth chevron of coloured squares, I will have them more in keeping with the Hasbro/Mattel 21x21, especially with regard to the quad. letter and word scores.
However - I'd already studied your board and on a hunch image-searched Google for Hexagonal Chess Boards...Oh boy! There are plenty, some for 6 players (Madness) one is lozenge shaped like a kids drawing of a WWI Land-ship! Others run round a 'pond' in the middle, it's a very informative lost hour or so's browsing...no no, after you, I've just had a go!
But...the hunch stands! If you increase the rear row to eight and line them up more conventionally (with the third hex colour's bishop in the pawn row) I think it's workable, and...no one seems to have done it yet.
There was the 6-set version with 9-hex back rows, but the six armies were over the corners as per the current Glinsky-Foy concept. I think if you put two players directly opposite on eight-hexed start lines, with three Bishops you've got a winner?
Hugh
and they've got star-shaped ones and oblong ones and round ones and ones shaped like....
It is a very strange, twilit world out there. Somewhere in one of my various odd diddy-boxes (it might be the one that says MADE FROM THE TEAK OF H.M.S SESAME) I still have one of the red pawns from this game. If it wasn't for that I might convince myself that it never happened, or it happened to someone else. Or maybe I actually was someone else, but that's a whole other topic, and only at weekends.
DeleteCheers - Tony