Thursday, April 22, 2010
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Some earlier piece concepts.....
The i moves like a chess king, and serves as a king in Stress. Unlike most other pieces, the i is incapable of wraparound movement.
The o moves like a chess queen, but cannot capture an adjacent piece.
The c moves like a chess rook, but cannot capture an adjacent piece.
The w moves like a chess bishop, but cannot capture an adjacent piece.
The e is exactly like chess knight, remembering that it can like most pieces jump off one side of the board to land on the other.
The j is similar to the chess knight, except that it jumps forward 3 instead of 2, and then one space to the left or right.
The a is similar to the chess knight, except that it jumps in a 3/2 ratio, giving it the longest jump in the game.
The n can neither capture nor be captured. It moves like a chess rook, but only one space at a time. This piece is good for defense or for mating.
No piece in chess is like the x, which moves up to 3 spaces in a zigzag pattern. It cannot move in the same direction twice or back to the space it just moved from. Unlike the other pieces, the x can capture multiple opposing pieces on the same turn.
The m borrows its personality from its neighbors. When moving without capturing, the m borrows the move of any adjacent friendly piece, including another m. To move and capture, the m must borrow its move from an adjacent enemy piece. If there are no adjacent pieces, the m is simply stranded. If the m captures a piece, it may then move again from that square with that pieces move to capture again, and so on. The m is potentially the most powerful piece on the board.
The g can only be captured by another g. This strange piece can actually remove squares from play, by turning them into voids. This piece can also reverse this process, and turn voids into squares. A g erases a square by leaving it. A g turns a void into a square by moving on to it. (A z can capture a g.)
The b is another strange piece, that does not capture but only bump both friendly and enemy pieces into empty squares or voids. A piece bumped into a void is lost, not captured. The b is useful for moving friendly pieces to more useful positions, such as switching the color of an x or a w. The b is also useful against an n. The b moves like a rook, but only one space. If a b bumps a b, the bump is conducted thru the second b, and so on.
The t moves like a chess rook, but only 3 spaces. Unlike the c, the t can capture an adjacent enemy piece.
The z is the only 3 dimensional piece in the game. It jumps to any of the 81 squares, but not instantaneously. The player must declare to what square the z intends to jump. The z is removed from its current square and held until the player's next turn. At this point the player can place the z on its declared target or move some other piece. If some other piece is moved, the z remains in the 3rd dimension. A player can still drop the z, but a one turn delay still applies, as the target space must again be declared. So the z will always cost either 2 or 3 turns to use. Perfect mobility isn't free. Also the z destroys otherwise indestructible pieces, like an n or a g, as well as any other piece. The z can also sacrifice itself upon impact, and create a void on the impact square. (It can do this whether or not a piece is being captured at the same time.)
The u is similar to the Spy in Stratego, except the u moves like an i in Stress. The u never appears as a u, but always in disguise. The u can only capture either the i or another u. An obvious disguise is an n, as an n is not expected to attack. Another possibility is that the u disguises itself as an i, an imposter.
The s moves and captures like a chess king. Unlike the i, the s can wraparound. The s and i are the most dangerous pieces at close range, and the s, unlike the i, can sacrifice itself.
The f freezes any enemy pieces adjacent to it. It moves like a chess king, but cannot capture. This piece is quite useful for mating. The m piece conducts the effect of a friendly f against enemies, but also the effect of an enemy f against friendlies.
The d piece can self-destruct, creating a nine square void with its own square in the middle. All pieces are lost. This self-destruction also "wraps around." The d can destroy up to 8 enemies in one move.
The r is like a chess bishop, except it can only move two spaces, but it can capture adjacent pieces, unlike the w.
The o moves like a chess queen, but cannot capture an adjacent piece.
The c moves like a chess rook, but cannot capture an adjacent piece.
The w moves like a chess bishop, but cannot capture an adjacent piece.
The e is exactly like chess knight, remembering that it can like most pieces jump off one side of the board to land on the other.
The j is similar to the chess knight, except that it jumps forward 3 instead of 2, and then one space to the left or right.
The a is similar to the chess knight, except that it jumps in a 3/2 ratio, giving it the longest jump in the game.
The n can neither capture nor be captured. It moves like a chess rook, but only one space at a time. This piece is good for defense or for mating.
No piece in chess is like the x, which moves up to 3 spaces in a zigzag pattern. It cannot move in the same direction twice or back to the space it just moved from. Unlike the other pieces, the x can capture multiple opposing pieces on the same turn.
The m borrows its personality from its neighbors. When moving without capturing, the m borrows the move of any adjacent friendly piece, including another m. To move and capture, the m must borrow its move from an adjacent enemy piece. If there are no adjacent pieces, the m is simply stranded. If the m captures a piece, it may then move again from that square with that pieces move to capture again, and so on. The m is potentially the most powerful piece on the board.
The g can only be captured by another g. This strange piece can actually remove squares from play, by turning them into voids. This piece can also reverse this process, and turn voids into squares. A g erases a square by leaving it. A g turns a void into a square by moving on to it. (A z can capture a g.)
The b is another strange piece, that does not capture but only bump both friendly and enemy pieces into empty squares or voids. A piece bumped into a void is lost, not captured. The b is useful for moving friendly pieces to more useful positions, such as switching the color of an x or a w. The b is also useful against an n. The b moves like a rook, but only one space. If a b bumps a b, the bump is conducted thru the second b, and so on.
The t moves like a chess rook, but only 3 spaces. Unlike the c, the t can capture an adjacent enemy piece.
The z is the only 3 dimensional piece in the game. It jumps to any of the 81 squares, but not instantaneously. The player must declare to what square the z intends to jump. The z is removed from its current square and held until the player's next turn. At this point the player can place the z on its declared target or move some other piece. If some other piece is moved, the z remains in the 3rd dimension. A player can still drop the z, but a one turn delay still applies, as the target space must again be declared. So the z will always cost either 2 or 3 turns to use. Perfect mobility isn't free. Also the z destroys otherwise indestructible pieces, like an n or a g, as well as any other piece. The z can also sacrifice itself upon impact, and create a void on the impact square. (It can do this whether or not a piece is being captured at the same time.)
The u is similar to the Spy in Stratego, except the u moves like an i in Stress. The u never appears as a u, but always in disguise. The u can only capture either the i or another u. An obvious disguise is an n, as an n is not expected to attack. Another possibility is that the u disguises itself as an i, an imposter.
The s moves and captures like a chess king. Unlike the i, the s can wraparound. The s and i are the most dangerous pieces at close range, and the s, unlike the i, can sacrifice itself.
The f freezes any enemy pieces adjacent to it. It moves like a chess king, but cannot capture. This piece is quite useful for mating. The m piece conducts the effect of a friendly f against enemies, but also the effect of an enemy f against friendlies.
The d piece can self-destruct, creating a nine square void with its own square in the middle. All pieces are lost. This self-destruction also "wraps around." The d can destroy up to 8 enemies in one move.
The r is like a chess bishop, except it can only move two spaces, but it can capture adjacent pieces, unlike the w.
Interpenetration, a sketch for a stragy game
Interpenetration is a variant of Particle Joust in which no pieces can move sideways, making every move a forward move.
The basic pieces would be the straight-mover, the diagonal mover, and the straight and diagonal mover. Let the pawn or the unit be the straight mover. Let the diagonal piece be the fusion of two such pawns. Let the straight-and-diagonal mover be the fusion of two such diagonals, or just a diagonal and a straightmover. The knight will be the Shogi knight, or a quarter of a Chess knight. The Thetan is still dangerous. The Lance is in its element, as it was always vulnerable to side attack in Particle Joust.
Interpenetration could be about the ninth rank, a flag, or just annihilation, by using a wrap-around rule.
To eliminate sideways movement. Now that is a step. Absurd und poetic.
The mirror is still here. The kerf is here. Perhaps even the zilch is here, as an aid to spirits. The spirit is here, but spiriting only forward. Perhaps the plutonium spirit is also here. A spirit that passes thru pieces that are adjacent, including diagonals. A maxima spirit. In a wraparound board, a long move can increase attack frequency. A spirit can pass far into enemy territory in order to kill the near. But annihilation joust really isn't about territory, unless the drop rule is applied to the home three ranks. No king. Just material at war. Material that seeks unequal trades, or to take without giving.
The Switch is a teleporter who only moves by exchanging positions with friendly pieces. He is a sort of hole or portal, through other piece can trade their positions. I don't know which letter yet to use, but this is a great piece. A piece for the thoughtful?
The Kerf or the Krazyhorse or the Killjoy. The K moves only by capturing, and can capture many times in a single turn. But the killjoy never moves in the same direction twice. The Killjoy is a Krooked Road w/o improvement. The Killjoy is perhaps even better in Forward Only Interpenetration. Because there is only forward movement, a killjoy will/can capture only one piece per rank. There is a poetry to this slicing. A zigzag knife thru material. The carving of a god. The war god. For the k-piece is bloody, killing with every step, and stepping forward for more blood with every kill. Stack pawns could play the non piece. Or stacked Vs. (We would have the I, the V, and the W. The trident would serve as the O.)
The trident becomes the "O." Now it is two tridents that combine to form a kerf, or a positron, or a knight. And every morph would be the result of a forward movement. The game would lose no speed. A morph is a threat. As a fusion increases range.
The spirit could normal move diagonal. He's an undead trident, or a spirit that stalks thru space like trident, preferring to pass thru pieces like a chess rook.
As mentioned, the spirit could be given the easier pass of all connected pieces, in forward direction. This might be too much.
Because the board offers wraparound possibilities. A player can opt to not move certain pieces, keeping them instead where he dropped them after their most recent wraparound, or from the game start point. A player can set traps for pieces he knows must come to him. A player's home territory is where the enemies are forced to come, like it or not. A player's home is also the way home for enemy pieces that want to make themselves available for drops. The middle 3 ranks would be the no-drop zone. A no funny business mandatory meeting.
Or a 7 by 7 board could be used, with only the first rank used for dropping. A piece could wait safely in the seventh rank, as the enemy can never attack there. As this would require sideways movement. This would tighten the board. Increasing the population density of power pieces.
Interpenetration emphasizes facing. The pieces are directionally focused. This was generally true in Particle Joust, but Particle Joust allowed sideways movement, which is a dilution. The name of the game is alternating current. To rivers that want to destroy one another.
Home territory is the staging zone. Both players run continuously into one another's staging zones. (Drop zones). The enemies seventh rank is an ideal place to hide, the only rank exempt from danger. Kind of absurd. This also blocks enemy staging, as enemy staging blocks seventh rank transport. This thickens the battle on the edges. The seventh rank is an ideal place to merge, as the merge will be safe until dropped yet again in a safe place (presumably).
A person could play 3 dimensional interpenetration. Holy shit. This reminds me of that 3-d tic tac toe program I once programmed in Pascal.
In 3D-Interpenetration, each player still only moves forward in his own monopolized facing. But he can also move diagonally up and down. A trident in the middle would have 9 moves, 9 possible captures. A Theta in the center would have 24 or something (hard to calculate) possibilities. 6 opposite/complementary directions in 3 dimensions. Each players has imperative direction, the opposite of one other player, and perpendicular to the others. 2 players could each pick a team in each dimension. It would almost require a nice computer program to make this game sensible/playable, but the potential is amazing.
Or it could be made a rule that non-opposite pieces cannot be captured. This would mean they were only either in the way or conveniently available for spirit-travel, etc. Or blockers and openers of space for the Z.
Or, perhaps the craziest yet. One Dimensional Particle Joust. One Dimensional Stress. Important pieces? The Spirit, the Lance, the Transfinite. The Non. The S (slayer) becomes a God. It is an accelerated particle, fed friends to accelerate its progress into enemies. Non longer nonlinear, it is perfectly linear.
One could have 7 different mono dimensions meet at their central square. And pieces could move into other dimensions from here. One could easily manage wraparound in monodimensional play. 7 one-dimensional loops, each seven spaces long, meet at the same fourth square. This would be a managable 7-dimensional game. Or one could do the same with 5 or 9 dimensions, or even eleven. An eleven dimensional game is pretty god damned insane. Or how about a 13 dimension game? This would put the Common Square (Hypershape) at the 7th space in each dimension. The board would be seven strips. The 7th space would often be already claimed. Could be too crazy.
But back to one dimensional Particle Joust. We should at least make the line a loop, yes? And perhaps allow drops freely. Yes. Or we could have a long line, 81 squares, and stick to the 27 square zone. Or just a nine square zone. Or we could use a Flag piece, which can be over-jumped by knights. We can here use jumpers of different potency, as jumpers become more significant. We can here use the Nons potently. The Nons come into their own. And so does the Golden Spirit. The Delta and the Lance are one. The Standard Infinite Forward, capturing and being captured. Through empty space. The usual. But we still keep in the Spirit. The Spirit is a beautiful piece, especially in one dimension, where pieces cannot move backward. The enemy is easier to line up/damn up, and the Spirit passes thru, capturing its choice.
We could do with 4 such lines and have a manageable 4 dimensional game. 4 lines of 16, like chess. Except for that shared hypercube. We would actually have 61 squares. We could call it Hypercubic Monodirectional Morphological Fusion Joust.
The On and the Non. The 1 and the 0. The basic team piece. Advance and hold. Two beautiful simple pieces. The knight is a hook, or a curve. The positron is a brutally simple slayer, a sort of nuclear weapon.
Fusion and fission become especially important here. The On or the One is a perfect cheap sacrifice for the Five, also known as the Slayer.
Yes, he used the digits this time as ideograms. The 10 digits could offer a rich game. 10 good pieces would do it.
The One is the simple Shogi style pawn.
The Two is the piece that can move and capture forward and backward equally. The 2 faced piece. Moving one or two squares in either direction. Fast and flexible.
The 3 is the curve or the hook. A potent piece in One Dimension. A piece that can get around Nons. A taker of Kings. (If Kings are used, perhaps a One should be a king. A crowned One. Or a circled one. Or call it a TEN. )
The 4 is the one dimensional Theta. It moves twice, and can capture twice. Each time it moves on or two spaces forward.
Distracted by thoughts of 3 dimensional Stress. The interdimensional pieces would have to be kept simple. Like Ms that live and move on a perpendicular plane.
Another idea. 2 dimensions, but one is vertical. Stacked lines. Most pieces do not climb up or down. Only a few. Perhaps elevators and droppers. The evalators and droppers are stuck perhaps in their vertical dimension. This is actually quite similar to Particle Joust, but visualized differently. As if with gravity and height, rather than length and width. But to have a vertical ninth rank is beautiful. A real board would have to be split level. Just like fucking Star Trek, bitch.
The pawn would be stuck on its current level, forward one. Neither climbing nor descending. Pieces would be captured from above or below, diagonally.
Units would have to merge in order to gain the power of ascension. Flying units could bound/zig zag. Birds of prey. The pieces must be carefully balanced.
The Red Loop, the Blue Loop, the Yellow Loop. They have one square in common, and this is their white square. This white square is the portal/bridge between the dimensions. Pieces have great power here. But they are also at great risk. If the game pieces are faced visually, then the players could be allowed to move the piece into a new dimension in either direction, and this choice will establish what is relatively forward for that piece. It is faced as it moves from the White Square, into a monodimensional square.
Or fuck it. Let's go Hyper. Let's go Four Dimensional. Or Fifth fucking dimensional. To repeat myself. Almost got to maintain that facial polarity, else the game too much to think on. The 2 is more special, if facing is standard.
But then twin dimensions might be nice. The game would be binary. The 2 would be potent in the middle. Owning all four directions. And the others stuck in one. The Square Squared ---that's meeting square, which is double-dimensional. The game board would be a cross, two loops that intersect at one abstract position. 16 space lines would not be too long. 11 would work also, and this would be a nice 21 squares total, with the 21st square being the magic square. Or call it the Twin Square. A transfinite could speed to this square to help in another dimension. It just occurred to me that friendlies will be in one another way. We need a special rule or perhaps a switch piece. The switch piece might have just become an essential piece.
Lets get back to stacks. To stacked lines. Instead of forward faced, the pieces could be upward faced.
Twin loops could meet at two points. Or one could have demolition derby with little or no dimensional crossover, just dangerous common squares. One could have an infinite piece that moves rook like in any direction, in any dimension. A queen as far as this game goes. The four faced piece. The two faced piece. The one face piece. Twin paralleled one-dimensional Moebius loops, overlapping at two points. And one could over lap a perpendicular set of twins at one of these points. This square would be 4 dimensional, a hypercube. We would have one, two, and four dimensional squares in the same game. Or the perpendicular twins could meet their complement twice, at the same two squares. So we would have many squares and and just two hypercubes. Nothing else. The Queens would be 8-faced. Perhaps this requires promotion by capture. Or just merging in the usual fashion. Or both. Should the Switch piece be unlimited? Or should his ability be confined to his dimension? Or do the pieces promote dimensionally?
One face. Two faced. Four faced. Four faces on the hypercube is eight directions. Eight functional faces. And one lands on the hypercube with one's current facing. And the mirrors respond accordingly. The spirits get seriously trippy here. As they can pass through dimensions as they are passing through adjacent pieces.
The jumpers might have a hard time getting on the hypercube, as they are not designed with such problems in mind. But this is nice in a way. It adds a comedy to the jumpers.
The Non functions much like a Parcheesi blockcade. A Non on a Hypercube is a serious blockcade, a dimensional blockade. And it is allowed. A Non on each hypercube would block all dimensional travel, unless the Switch was made multi-dimensional.
Most pieces should still be one faced. To keep with the directional theme. The multi-faced pieces are takers from behind, assassins. Higher beings. A mostly empty board gives infinite pieces the ability to attack other pieces from either direction. We could allow a smooth uninterrupted movement/capture between the dimensions. Or we could say that piece must land on the hypercube to switch tracks. This makes possession of the Hypercubes crucial.
Even a one faced piece can switch dimensions. It simply makes its choice when moving from the hypercube. And it continues in this dimension in this direction.
I see now that a 3 space jumper is crucial, as this 3 spacer can jump from behind a spirit, and thus be protected from the other side of the Non it is jumping.
It's nice to whittle it down, but nice also to offer variety. Merging is generally a good game ingredients, but perhaps not always. Give the player a choice between quantity and quality. Either is a risk. More eggs in one basket, but its a nicer basket. Some players may specialize in using simple pieces in tandem. No one likes to trade expensive pieces for cheap. And expensive pieces are often threatened. At the same time, they are the supreme counter-threats.
A king piece might be nice in Mono Joust. A one faced, one spaced piece. A weakling who needs protection. Or the King could be an O. An O is dangerous enough. Perhaps just a Binary, an M.
The basic pieces would be the straight-mover, the diagonal mover, and the straight and diagonal mover. Let the pawn or the unit be the straight mover. Let the diagonal piece be the fusion of two such pawns. Let the straight-and-diagonal mover be the fusion of two such diagonals, or just a diagonal and a straightmover. The knight will be the Shogi knight, or a quarter of a Chess knight. The Thetan is still dangerous. The Lance is in its element, as it was always vulnerable to side attack in Particle Joust.
Interpenetration could be about the ninth rank, a flag, or just annihilation, by using a wrap-around rule.
To eliminate sideways movement. Now that is a step. Absurd und poetic.
The mirror is still here. The kerf is here. Perhaps even the zilch is here, as an aid to spirits. The spirit is here, but spiriting only forward. Perhaps the plutonium spirit is also here. A spirit that passes thru pieces that are adjacent, including diagonals. A maxima spirit. In a wraparound board, a long move can increase attack frequency. A spirit can pass far into enemy territory in order to kill the near. But annihilation joust really isn't about territory, unless the drop rule is applied to the home three ranks. No king. Just material at war. Material that seeks unequal trades, or to take without giving.
The Switch is a teleporter who only moves by exchanging positions with friendly pieces. He is a sort of hole or portal, through other piece can trade their positions. I don't know which letter yet to use, but this is a great piece. A piece for the thoughtful?
The Kerf or the Krazyhorse or the Killjoy. The K moves only by capturing, and can capture many times in a single turn. But the killjoy never moves in the same direction twice. The Killjoy is a Krooked Road w/o improvement. The Killjoy is perhaps even better in Forward Only Interpenetration. Because there is only forward movement, a killjoy will/can capture only one piece per rank. There is a poetry to this slicing. A zigzag knife thru material. The carving of a god. The war god. For the k-piece is bloody, killing with every step, and stepping forward for more blood with every kill. Stack pawns could play the non piece. Or stacked Vs. (We would have the I, the V, and the W. The trident would serve as the O.)
The trident becomes the "O." Now it is two tridents that combine to form a kerf, or a positron, or a knight. And every morph would be the result of a forward movement. The game would lose no speed. A morph is a threat. As a fusion increases range.
The spirit could normal move diagonal. He's an undead trident, or a spirit that stalks thru space like trident, preferring to pass thru pieces like a chess rook.
As mentioned, the spirit could be given the easier pass of all connected pieces, in forward direction. This might be too much.
Because the board offers wraparound possibilities. A player can opt to not move certain pieces, keeping them instead where he dropped them after their most recent wraparound, or from the game start point. A player can set traps for pieces he knows must come to him. A player's home territory is where the enemies are forced to come, like it or not. A player's home is also the way home for enemy pieces that want to make themselves available for drops. The middle 3 ranks would be the no-drop zone. A no funny business mandatory meeting.
Or a 7 by 7 board could be used, with only the first rank used for dropping. A piece could wait safely in the seventh rank, as the enemy can never attack there. As this would require sideways movement. This would tighten the board. Increasing the population density of power pieces.
Interpenetration emphasizes facing. The pieces are directionally focused. This was generally true in Particle Joust, but Particle Joust allowed sideways movement, which is a dilution. The name of the game is alternating current. To rivers that want to destroy one another.
Home territory is the staging zone. Both players run continuously into one another's staging zones. (Drop zones). The enemies seventh rank is an ideal place to hide, the only rank exempt from danger. Kind of absurd. This also blocks enemy staging, as enemy staging blocks seventh rank transport. This thickens the battle on the edges. The seventh rank is an ideal place to merge, as the merge will be safe until dropped yet again in a safe place (presumably).
A person could play 3 dimensional interpenetration. Holy shit. This reminds me of that 3-d tic tac toe program I once programmed in Pascal.
In 3D-Interpenetration, each player still only moves forward in his own monopolized facing. But he can also move diagonally up and down. A trident in the middle would have 9 moves, 9 possible captures. A Theta in the center would have 24 or something (hard to calculate) possibilities. 6 opposite/complementary directions in 3 dimensions. Each players has imperative direction, the opposite of one other player, and perpendicular to the others. 2 players could each pick a team in each dimension. It would almost require a nice computer program to make this game sensible/playable, but the potential is amazing.
Or it could be made a rule that non-opposite pieces cannot be captured. This would mean they were only either in the way or conveniently available for spirit-travel, etc. Or blockers and openers of space for the Z.
Or, perhaps the craziest yet. One Dimensional Particle Joust. One Dimensional Stress. Important pieces? The Spirit, the Lance, the Transfinite. The Non. The S (slayer) becomes a God. It is an accelerated particle, fed friends to accelerate its progress into enemies. Non longer nonlinear, it is perfectly linear.
One could have 7 different mono dimensions meet at their central square. And pieces could move into other dimensions from here. One could easily manage wraparound in monodimensional play. 7 one-dimensional loops, each seven spaces long, meet at the same fourth square. This would be a managable 7-dimensional game. Or one could do the same with 5 or 9 dimensions, or even eleven. An eleven dimensional game is pretty god damned insane. Or how about a 13 dimension game? This would put the Common Square (Hypershape) at the 7th space in each dimension. The board would be seven strips. The 7th space would often be already claimed. Could be too crazy.
But back to one dimensional Particle Joust. We should at least make the line a loop, yes? And perhaps allow drops freely. Yes. Or we could have a long line, 81 squares, and stick to the 27 square zone. Or just a nine square zone. Or we could use a Flag piece, which can be over-jumped by knights. We can here use jumpers of different potency, as jumpers become more significant. We can here use the Nons potently. The Nons come into their own. And so does the Golden Spirit. The Delta and the Lance are one. The Standard Infinite Forward, capturing and being captured. Through empty space. The usual. But we still keep in the Spirit. The Spirit is a beautiful piece, especially in one dimension, where pieces cannot move backward. The enemy is easier to line up/damn up, and the Spirit passes thru, capturing its choice.
We could do with 4 such lines and have a manageable 4 dimensional game. 4 lines of 16, like chess. Except for that shared hypercube. We would actually have 61 squares. We could call it Hypercubic Monodirectional Morphological Fusion Joust.
The On and the Non. The 1 and the 0. The basic team piece. Advance and hold. Two beautiful simple pieces. The knight is a hook, or a curve. The positron is a brutally simple slayer, a sort of nuclear weapon.
Fusion and fission become especially important here. The On or the One is a perfect cheap sacrifice for the Five, also known as the Slayer.
Yes, he used the digits this time as ideograms. The 10 digits could offer a rich game. 10 good pieces would do it.
The One is the simple Shogi style pawn.
The Two is the piece that can move and capture forward and backward equally. The 2 faced piece. Moving one or two squares in either direction. Fast and flexible.
The 3 is the curve or the hook. A potent piece in One Dimension. A piece that can get around Nons. A taker of Kings. (If Kings are used, perhaps a One should be a king. A crowned One. Or a circled one. Or call it a TEN. )
The 4 is the one dimensional Theta. It moves twice, and can capture twice. Each time it moves on or two spaces forward.
Distracted by thoughts of 3 dimensional Stress. The interdimensional pieces would have to be kept simple. Like Ms that live and move on a perpendicular plane.
Another idea. 2 dimensions, but one is vertical. Stacked lines. Most pieces do not climb up or down. Only a few. Perhaps elevators and droppers. The evalators and droppers are stuck perhaps in their vertical dimension. This is actually quite similar to Particle Joust, but visualized differently. As if with gravity and height, rather than length and width. But to have a vertical ninth rank is beautiful. A real board would have to be split level. Just like fucking Star Trek, bitch.
The pawn would be stuck on its current level, forward one. Neither climbing nor descending. Pieces would be captured from above or below, diagonally.
Units would have to merge in order to gain the power of ascension. Flying units could bound/zig zag. Birds of prey. The pieces must be carefully balanced.
The Red Loop, the Blue Loop, the Yellow Loop. They have one square in common, and this is their white square. This white square is the portal/bridge between the dimensions. Pieces have great power here. But they are also at great risk. If the game pieces are faced visually, then the players could be allowed to move the piece into a new dimension in either direction, and this choice will establish what is relatively forward for that piece. It is faced as it moves from the White Square, into a monodimensional square.
Or fuck it. Let's go Hyper. Let's go Four Dimensional. Or Fifth fucking dimensional. To repeat myself. Almost got to maintain that facial polarity, else the game too much to think on. The 2 is more special, if facing is standard.
But then twin dimensions might be nice. The game would be binary. The 2 would be potent in the middle. Owning all four directions. And the others stuck in one. The Square Squared ---that's meeting square, which is double-dimensional. The game board would be a cross, two loops that intersect at one abstract position. 16 space lines would not be too long. 11 would work also, and this would be a nice 21 squares total, with the 21st square being the magic square. Or call it the Twin Square. A transfinite could speed to this square to help in another dimension. It just occurred to me that friendlies will be in one another way. We need a special rule or perhaps a switch piece. The switch piece might have just become an essential piece.
Lets get back to stacks. To stacked lines. Instead of forward faced, the pieces could be upward faced.
Twin loops could meet at two points. Or one could have demolition derby with little or no dimensional crossover, just dangerous common squares. One could have an infinite piece that moves rook like in any direction, in any dimension. A queen as far as this game goes. The four faced piece. The two faced piece. The one face piece. Twin paralleled one-dimensional Moebius loops, overlapping at two points. And one could over lap a perpendicular set of twins at one of these points. This square would be 4 dimensional, a hypercube. We would have one, two, and four dimensional squares in the same game. Or the perpendicular twins could meet their complement twice, at the same two squares. So we would have many squares and and just two hypercubes. Nothing else. The Queens would be 8-faced. Perhaps this requires promotion by capture. Or just merging in the usual fashion. Or both. Should the Switch piece be unlimited? Or should his ability be confined to his dimension? Or do the pieces promote dimensionally?
One face. Two faced. Four faced. Four faces on the hypercube is eight directions. Eight functional faces. And one lands on the hypercube with one's current facing. And the mirrors respond accordingly. The spirits get seriously trippy here. As they can pass through dimensions as they are passing through adjacent pieces.
The jumpers might have a hard time getting on the hypercube, as they are not designed with such problems in mind. But this is nice in a way. It adds a comedy to the jumpers.
The Non functions much like a Parcheesi blockcade. A Non on a Hypercube is a serious blockcade, a dimensional blockade. And it is allowed. A Non on each hypercube would block all dimensional travel, unless the Switch was made multi-dimensional.
Most pieces should still be one faced. To keep with the directional theme. The multi-faced pieces are takers from behind, assassins. Higher beings. A mostly empty board gives infinite pieces the ability to attack other pieces from either direction. We could allow a smooth uninterrupted movement/capture between the dimensions. Or we could say that piece must land on the hypercube to switch tracks. This makes possession of the Hypercubes crucial.
Even a one faced piece can switch dimensions. It simply makes its choice when moving from the hypercube. And it continues in this dimension in this direction.
I see now that a 3 space jumper is crucial, as this 3 spacer can jump from behind a spirit, and thus be protected from the other side of the Non it is jumping.
It's nice to whittle it down, but nice also to offer variety. Merging is generally a good game ingredients, but perhaps not always. Give the player a choice between quantity and quality. Either is a risk. More eggs in one basket, but its a nicer basket. Some players may specialize in using simple pieces in tandem. No one likes to trade expensive pieces for cheap. And expensive pieces are often threatened. At the same time, they are the supreme counter-threats.
A king piece might be nice in Mono Joust. A one faced, one spaced piece. A weakling who needs protection. Or the King could be an O. An O is dangerous enough. Perhaps just a Binary, an M.
more strategy game innovations (?)
The Golden Spirit cannot be captured. Nor can it capture. Nor can it move except by moving through other pieces. It lands at the next empty space. The next spirit up is the transparent spirit. It is the same as the golden spirit, except that it cannot capture the ninth and it can move backwards. This makes it a supreme defensive piece.
Two tridents can merge to create a lance. This makes the tridents a potent team piece, giving them the ability to shoot by the drawn out defense.
Two omnis (or orffs) can merge to form any piece desired. The omnis have all the advantages of the tridents and then some, but they are twice as expensive.
The mothers are quite useful as defensive line pieces, as they defend one another and are quite cheap. Two mothers can merge to form an omni. So a line of four mothers can merge in a few moves into any piece at all. This makes the mother capable of re-enforcing the offense if a defensive line is unnecessary.
The Delta is the supreme mover on the board, having an infinite range in two directions. It moves like a chess bishop, except only in the two forward directions.
The Jelly is the supreme close range fighter, as its maneuverability makes it difficult to predict, and just as difficult to trap. A toothless jelly doesn't capture, but still is dangerous as a seeker of the ninth rank. A transparent jelly doesn't capture and also moves three rather than two spaces as a chess king. Except not backwards, as almost always in this game.
The Spirit is a lethal piece, as it moves not through empty space but rather aligned pieces, enemy or friendly. This gives it a range potentially as good as the Deltas, but it is dependent upon other peices. It's sideways movement makes it valuable for defense, also. The spirit is perhaps the most potent piece.
The transfinite does not capture, but because it moves like a forward only chess knight, it can jump past unwary defenders. It's speed of two is quite enough, if it teleports to the right space.
There is a bouncing version of the transfinite, that like the spirit, depends on other friendly pieces for movement. It hops like a forward chess knight. It captures friendly pieces, which allows it to jump to yet another friendly piece, capturing it, and so on. All a player has to do is create stepping stones that lead into the ninth, and the sacrifice is worth it. It can only capture an enemy after having captured a friendly. Sometimes this is worth it. It's a great piece for surprises.
THe game can be played in two ways. One wins by merely landing on the ninth rank, or one wins by holding it just one move. The opponent has only their next turn to capture any enemy pieces that land on his ninth rank.
This makes a rank especially suited for the m, and also the spirit and the o, as only these three pieces move sideways, and only sideways movement can capture an enemy of the ninth rank. A pawn is a half-price blocker, not bad if guarded by an m, but otherwise useless for the first rank. A spirit is perhaps the supreme defensive piece, if stationed on the first rank. But the spirit needs an unbroken line of pieces. It becomes clear that a good attack is a combination, as in boxing. Essential defenders must be disabled.
An O can merge with an M to become a N. The N is a non. It doesn't move. It doesn't do anything. It cannot be captured. A spirit can still move through it.
The spirit's mutations are the most exciting, as two squares become vacant as a vacant square becomes the home of a perhaps unexpected piece. The maker of this game expects the pro players to use spirits.
This game is so rich with offensive opportunity, that an inspired player such be able to keep the pressure on, until the ninth is captured.
If a Delta captures a friendly twin, it can move again, in the other direction if it wants. This is only useful in rare situations, as the player could just move the second Delta to begin with. So the trick is good for discovered attack situations, or for a doomed Delta to turn its death into speed.
If a prime captures a prime, it can become "female," lose the ability to capture, but gain the ability to move backwards.
Two tridents can merge to create a lance. This makes the tridents a potent team piece, giving them the ability to shoot by the drawn out defense.
Two omnis (or orffs) can merge to form any piece desired. The omnis have all the advantages of the tridents and then some, but they are twice as expensive.
The mothers are quite useful as defensive line pieces, as they defend one another and are quite cheap. Two mothers can merge to form an omni. So a line of four mothers can merge in a few moves into any piece at all. This makes the mother capable of re-enforcing the offense if a defensive line is unnecessary.
The Delta is the supreme mover on the board, having an infinite range in two directions. It moves like a chess bishop, except only in the two forward directions.
The Jelly is the supreme close range fighter, as its maneuverability makes it difficult to predict, and just as difficult to trap. A toothless jelly doesn't capture, but still is dangerous as a seeker of the ninth rank. A transparent jelly doesn't capture and also moves three rather than two spaces as a chess king. Except not backwards, as almost always in this game.
The Spirit is a lethal piece, as it moves not through empty space but rather aligned pieces, enemy or friendly. This gives it a range potentially as good as the Deltas, but it is dependent upon other peices. It's sideways movement makes it valuable for defense, also. The spirit is perhaps the most potent piece.
The transfinite does not capture, but because it moves like a forward only chess knight, it can jump past unwary defenders. It's speed of two is quite enough, if it teleports to the right space.
There is a bouncing version of the transfinite, that like the spirit, depends on other friendly pieces for movement. It hops like a forward chess knight. It captures friendly pieces, which allows it to jump to yet another friendly piece, capturing it, and so on. All a player has to do is create stepping stones that lead into the ninth, and the sacrifice is worth it. It can only capture an enemy after having captured a friendly. Sometimes this is worth it. It's a great piece for surprises.
THe game can be played in two ways. One wins by merely landing on the ninth rank, or one wins by holding it just one move. The opponent has only their next turn to capture any enemy pieces that land on his ninth rank.
This makes a rank especially suited for the m, and also the spirit and the o, as only these three pieces move sideways, and only sideways movement can capture an enemy of the ninth rank. A pawn is a half-price blocker, not bad if guarded by an m, but otherwise useless for the first rank. A spirit is perhaps the supreme defensive piece, if stationed on the first rank. But the spirit needs an unbroken line of pieces. It becomes clear that a good attack is a combination, as in boxing. Essential defenders must be disabled.
An O can merge with an M to become a N. The N is a non. It doesn't move. It doesn't do anything. It cannot be captured. A spirit can still move through it.
The spirit's mutations are the most exciting, as two squares become vacant as a vacant square becomes the home of a perhaps unexpected piece. The maker of this game expects the pro players to use spirits.
This game is so rich with offensive opportunity, that an inspired player such be able to keep the pressure on, until the ninth is captured.
If a Delta captures a friendly twin, it can move again, in the other direction if it wants. This is only useful in rare situations, as the player could just move the second Delta to begin with. So the trick is good for discovered attack situations, or for a doomed Delta to turn its death into speed.
If a prime captures a prime, it can become "female," lose the ability to capture, but gain the ability to move backwards.
game ideas
A wraparound 1D board can be thought of as a circle. It can be thought of as a flat circle or something like the loop of a roller coaster. It's all the same. To go east is just another way to go west. Or better yet: to go forwards is to end up behind yourself.
In a 1d game, pieces should be differentiated as to whether they can go only forwards or both forwards and backwards. This will make the bi-directional pieces more dangerous and more exciting. For example, in Chess it is the Queen that sells the game. The Queen is beautifully infinite. And yet the Knight exists as the shadow of the Queen. The Knight moves only to that close range space that the Queen does not. So it's only a Knight that can threaten a Queen without being threatened by that Queen.
In Chess, the Bishop and the Rook are both different halves of the Queen. The Rook is judged more valuable, as the Bishop is confined to one color. Of course the Queen is actually therefore a double bishop, as its rook move allows it to change the color of its "inner Bishop."
In Chess, the Pawn is also a combination of the Rook and the Bishop, albeit in a reduced form. The Pawn is the only directionalized piece in Chess. It moves forward like a Rook, and captures diagonally like a Bishop, but only forward and only a single space, excepting its first move, of course, which was invented to speed the game up. Note that it is the Pawn and only the Pawn that can become a Queen. A pawn on the 7th, if it can safely claim the 8th, is better than a Rook, allowing of course for exceptional situations.
A brief tour of the Zweidorff family of games:
First there was Omni Directional Stress, which was a mix of Chess, Shogi, and Stratego. This game still featured directionalized pawns, but was otherwise more omnidirectional than Chess, as it allowed wraparound. Wraparound makes the board unbounded but finite in its number of locations. But Mr. Zweidorff was soon distracted by the intense directionality of Shogi, and thus derailed from the Stress theme, which was finished enough already, and tackled what would soon be yclept Particle Joust.
At about this same time, the strange and wonderful concept of fusion and fission crept in. Pieces could combine to form new pieces. Zweidorff wanted the promotion factor of Shogi, but struggled with how best to integrate this. He was ambivalent about piece drops. First he thought that a player could merely spend a turn and split a piece perhaps into 3 constituent atoms. But this wasn't simple, as a piece would require adjacent empty spaces for this. And it seemed to break the flow of pure movement. At some point it just clicked. All morphs were also moves. Fusion of the result of a friendly capturing a friendly, which is best thought of as a stacking. Fission was the result of the unstacking, or the moving a piece from the stack to a space within its traditional movement range. For convenience, Zweidorff allowed the pawns to de-stack or fission sideways, although they normally move only forward. This served to make his two second level pieces more interchangable, and more generally flexible. But it was a concession of consistency. Still, how else could pawns form defenders on the first rank? The rank that had at all costs to be defended?
To illustrate the morphology of his game, he considered a starting state of 27 pawns, the atoms at the root of all the pieces. Each player would take his first turns to fuse his pawns into a desired army, pseudo-continuously with an opponent doing the same. A test run of this displayed its limitations. It wasn't exciting to open a game so slowly. A better idea seemed to be starting the game off with no pawns at all, but at the least with all second tier pieces. These at least could fuse into Lances and Stones. Or into the O piece (third tier) which fused with itself to become any fourth tier piece.
Particle Joust was morphological, which was grand, and pseudo-omnidirectional. It was pseudo to the degree that it allowed sidereal movement. Certain pieces could potentially never advance. True, they could not move backward, but they could also avoid advancement. This was fine for a game that rewarded aggression, whose goal was a safe landing on the farthest rank, but it was still a concession. To maximize the poetry of the "directional theme," Mr. Zweidorff finally abolished sidereal movement. This was the birth of Interpenetration.
Interpenetration was also related to A Vision by Yeats, and to the Star of David, as well as perhaps to Plato, and philosophy and mysticism in general. It was also a hermaphroditic alchemical metaphor. The Royal Hermaphrodite. The Tetractys of Pythagoras, as "10" is the juxtaposition of penis and vagina, or yang and yin, etc.
But all this was hardly necessary to enjoy the game as a game. Zweidorff was torn between making Interpenetration a wraparound game or a final rank game, or even a flag-king-based Stratego-Chess game. If he allowed a wraparound, the game could be conceived of as two rivers of pieces running through one another in opposite directions. Just as good, it could be thought of as Alternating Current, the type of electricity that powers our daily lives.
And because movement is turned based rather than continuous, alternating current is the most accurate analogy. Interpenetration was still morphological, as this morph-element was too exciting to abandon.
When Zweidorff eliminated sidereal movement from Particle Joust, and yet kept his already developed pieces, he was of course required to edit these same pieces. The M, which is was completely sideways piece, was simply abolished. The W was now no different than the O. He thought the V could be re-instated. It was now the I and the V that were the basic pieces. And the W was the sum of these, being both visually and dynamically their sum. The O, devoid of its sideways movement, was exactly the same as the W. So the O would now take the role of the new W-style Theta. The O was a W that moved twice, possibly changing directions. He still wasn't sure if he should allow it to capture twice.
The L-jumping pieces did not need changing, but only gain relative power as other pieces lost some mobility.
The Spirit piece lost significant power, but such is life. On the other hand, a lack of sideways movement might make pieces in general more vulnerable to the Spirit. And it was possible to allow the Spirit a W move thru empty space.
The Mirror piece was the same, really, although it mirror only forward moves, rather than forward and/or sideways moves. The Kerf, or the Nonlinear, or call it what you will, perhaps gained power. As adjacent pieces were perhaps more likely, blockages more expected.
A player could win Interpenetration by damning up his opponents movement. If an opponent cannot move, he loses. It's that simple. Move or die. Like a shark. Interpenetration is Shark Joust.
If he allowed a wraparound in the forward/backward dimension, this would require a teleport from the far end of the board to the near end. Perhaps from the final to the first rank. This would make the edge ranks quite important, as the enemy cannot capture a player's pieces on the player's 7th (for example) or the enemies 1st. This is because no pieces can move sideways. And the Red player's teleport home is simultaneously the home rank of the Black pieces. So possession of these squares becomes important. A place ripe for ambush, mergers, the staging of an offense. And this leaves the middle area of the board as a neutral zone, where pieces on both sides are at their most vulnerable.
This sort of Interpenetration could be played either to annihilation or the capture of the King-piece, provided for the occasion. Another possibility was to have one and only one static piece, a piece that would serve as the Flag serves in Stratego. Both defenders and attackers of this Flag could only defend or attack it in passing. Yes, certain pieces can not-move, of course, of other pieces are moved instead, and this is the crux of the drama. To force moves becomes important in Interpenetration. And the Non piece, which functions as does a Blockade in Parcheesi, is possibly essential. The Non is created by the Merger of On pieces. On plus On equals Non. 1 + 1 = 0.
When Zweidorff saw the movement patterns of the Gold and the Silver in Shogi, he thought of fighting fish. They were much better pieces forward than they were backward. So he stripped the backward moves from these fighting fish, and that was Particle Joust. But then he saw that the sideways moves were still a compromise, and stripped these away also. This was Interpenetration, and is also, excepting Kings, Checkers.
A Note On Influences:
From Chess, the obvious omnidirectional form of varied pieces, and the notion of a King to be captured. Chess + Stratego = Stress.
From Chess, the omnidirectionality. From Stratego, the creative choice as to which pieces to begin the game with.
Then there was Drop Stress or Morph Stress (or just Morff). This was an introduction of the promotion as well as the drop element of Shogi, and yet also a new element. The morph element, if allowed without limits both for fusion and fission, makes all pieces the organs of a single piece. The king is not a piece on the board but all pieces on the board that the player controls. The player exists as a system of pieces, and this system can take different forms. But we've explored this already.
As our hero was editing Stress/Particle Joust pieces for Interpenetration, he was struck by the thought of a 3 dimensional board. Pieces would still move only forward, but also up or down (necessarily diagonally). This was a mind bend, as it gave the Theta piece some crazy potency. Well, it was only a step to 4 dimensions, or 11. But these would not be playable, unless....
Unless the game was mostly 2 dimensional with limited squares that were 3 or 4 dimensional. This was easily achieved by the limited junction of the 2 different 2 dimensional zones at a 4 dimensional junction. Or 7 two-dimensional zones could be junctioned for 14 dimensions, and so on. Or...
And then it hit him. Why not go "down" to One Dimension. He had read that nice book Flatland, and here he was composing Chess for Lineland, which as any good reader knows its a place visited by A Square in that same book.
He now had to edit his precious pieces once again. Backwards movement was already gone long since. Sideways movement had been removed after. All that was left was diagonal movement. Just as the elimination of sideways movement had make the W equivalent to the O, so did the elimination of the diagonal movement make the I equivalent to the W. Nice!
But what could one do with the L-jumpers? It was simple really. They now just jumped straight head, which became quite important in a monodimensional game. The L-jumpers were now just I-jumpers.
The Mirror was still the mirror, although less threatened. The Killer piece was still the killer piece, except he now had to be allowed to move in a linear fashion. He became purely about cost now, and not at all about shape, excepting the necessary juxtaposition of his targets both friendly and opposed.
The positron, as a jumper, was still quite feasible, but not as exciting perhaps. So maybe one could allow the positron to alternate between eating a friend and an enemy. This would give it its glory back. It could still make amazing moves, if the pieces were aligned right.
The Spirit was perhaps more glorious in one dimension, as the problem of being in one's own way reaches a maximum here. The Spirit likes pieces in its way, for pieces are its way. The Spirit was born for monodimensionality.
The Spirit, the Non, the Positron, the Slayer, the On...what else?
The Theta is still possible, and especially if one allows it to move both forwards and backwards. (Yes, Interpenetration can now justify backward movement, as long as the One Dimension is circular. To go forwards is also to go backwards. But for poetic reasons, most pieces should still be strongly faced, directional, etc. This gives the Theta its charm.) So the Theta can move and capture twice. Making it still quite dangerous at close range, and dangerous to "protected" pieces and the pieces that "protect" them. For the Theta scoops them both up.
We cannot forget the Lance or the Rook or the Queen. For in One Dimension, the Rook is the Bishop is the Queen. Infinite movement is infinite movement. The only possible distinction is whether or not the piece is faced, or bidirectional. It might be nice to have both. The two-faced piece would be like the Double Delta, something quite expensive. This would be the Queen. The other unidirectional piece would serve as the Lance. Call them what you will. This gives us a respectable set.
A recent idea was the use of only one colored piece in order to represent all others. This could be done by the use of stacking. So a stack would get its movement/identity from nothing but the number of homogenous pieces within its stack. And fission would just be the movement of pieces off the stack.
It occurred to Mr. Zweidorff, that the pieces could unstack according the movement pattern of their associate sub-stack. If 3 pieces were to jump off a stack of 7, then these 3 pieces could indeed jump, assuming that the 3-stack was equivalent to the jumper.
If the Non was a stack of 2, and the Jump was a stack of a 3, then a stack of 5 could fission into a Non and a Jump, by means of its top three pieces jumping (as one Jump piece) off the stack, over the forward adjacent space. This would leave behind two chips, which would instantaneously become the Non. In a One Dimensional game, where pieces are in one another's way, a more flexible merging-system is perhaps desirable. A smart player is master of merging. Merging is movement is attack is defense. Some brilliant moves are made possible. But the merge/promotion system must be perfectly designed. This is the tricky part. We don't want the stacks too high. We want maximum flexibility. Trial and error are perhaps the best method for designing this system.
The board could be a nice circular track. The pieces could be something like checkers, but perhaps not as tall and more interlocking, to allow for easier stacking. Most of each player pieces would be moving in the same direction. A few could move relatively backwards, and therefore take the enemy from behind. Of course two circles could be joined at a 2-dimensional junction space, and this could also be nice. Or there could be 2-junction spaces. This would give us parallel dimensions. The junction spaces would be like the meeting of railroad tracks, or places where pieces could move between dimensions. Pieces on such squares would be more threatening as well as more threatened.
What is the goal? Was ist die Wesen? (guessing on "Wesen"). The goal is to create a platform for competitive creativity. Or in some cases just creativity. Mr. Zweidorff likes the idea of Stress problems being composed and solved by others. Stress pieces are more complicated than those of Chess.
+++
It's the next day, and our author is high. He has tested some games and found them wanting, probably because he is playing against himself and also it was just too much number-space crunching. It's about the god damned poetry. Perhaps his games will be better for Problem Art than actually playing. But that would not be good. An absurd obsession perhaps. Just like math, it is conceptual art.
The pieces are little machines. Little abstract/conceptual tools that exist as part of a system of tools. A piece has a value in relation to other pieces. Any non contingent value approximations are useful and perhaps even necessary, but also deceptive as to the nature of the game.
We have 3 basic ways in which to make a piece valuable in a move/capture game like chess, etc. We can give it more speed, more turning radius, or some special ability.
The On, the Non, the Son, the Ton, the Con. The One and the Fun and the Done. And the Gone.
The name of the game is On. The name of the basic piece is "On." An On in the heart of the game. But what is an On? Is an On a Pawn?
Should the game be about capture, or just about movement? A nice twist. Perhaps the object is to jam up the opponent. Move or lose. And pieces perhaps could morph but neither capture nor be captured.
Maybe Drop Stress is the way to go. A Stress with drops wherein pieces can only move if they can capture. This puts the emphasis on the drops. This makes dropped pieces more vulnerable to dropping pieces. From there, one could play it 2 ways. Either the captured pieces are used/dropped as one's own, or pieces are gradually annihilated, as in Chess.
A player has 9 or 7 or 17 pieces, and drops his choice of piece into his choice of position. In a game like this, pieces can be dropped where they are most potent, and the lack of starting positions will keep the game fresh. No players will have the same game. As they will choose different pieces. Or they can commit to using the same pieces according to taste.
This reduces or at least changes the number crunching aspect. We like to dream up attacks, not do the drudgework. The drop is surgical.
The drop ties us to Go and Shogi. But in other ways we are dealing with Chess, as this game is omnidirectional. To maximize creative possibilities, and also because a game like this gives neither player a home territory. True, a player may choose to cluster his pieces, but that is according to taste.
This game could hang on the wall like a painting. Magnetic letters could serve as pieces. Both players could view the game comfortably from the same angle. This is a reverse of Interpenetration. Or perhaps its fulfillment. The opponents interpenetrate within a cloud of one another's pieces.
In a 1d game, pieces should be differentiated as to whether they can go only forwards or both forwards and backwards. This will make the bi-directional pieces more dangerous and more exciting. For example, in Chess it is the Queen that sells the game. The Queen is beautifully infinite. And yet the Knight exists as the shadow of the Queen. The Knight moves only to that close range space that the Queen does not. So it's only a Knight that can threaten a Queen without being threatened by that Queen.
In Chess, the Bishop and the Rook are both different halves of the Queen. The Rook is judged more valuable, as the Bishop is confined to one color. Of course the Queen is actually therefore a double bishop, as its rook move allows it to change the color of its "inner Bishop."
In Chess, the Pawn is also a combination of the Rook and the Bishop, albeit in a reduced form. The Pawn is the only directionalized piece in Chess. It moves forward like a Rook, and captures diagonally like a Bishop, but only forward and only a single space, excepting its first move, of course, which was invented to speed the game up. Note that it is the Pawn and only the Pawn that can become a Queen. A pawn on the 7th, if it can safely claim the 8th, is better than a Rook, allowing of course for exceptional situations.
A brief tour of the Zweidorff family of games:
First there was Omni Directional Stress, which was a mix of Chess, Shogi, and Stratego. This game still featured directionalized pawns, but was otherwise more omnidirectional than Chess, as it allowed wraparound. Wraparound makes the board unbounded but finite in its number of locations. But Mr. Zweidorff was soon distracted by the intense directionality of Shogi, and thus derailed from the Stress theme, which was finished enough already, and tackled what would soon be yclept Particle Joust.
At about this same time, the strange and wonderful concept of fusion and fission crept in. Pieces could combine to form new pieces. Zweidorff wanted the promotion factor of Shogi, but struggled with how best to integrate this. He was ambivalent about piece drops. First he thought that a player could merely spend a turn and split a piece perhaps into 3 constituent atoms. But this wasn't simple, as a piece would require adjacent empty spaces for this. And it seemed to break the flow of pure movement. At some point it just clicked. All morphs were also moves. Fusion of the result of a friendly capturing a friendly, which is best thought of as a stacking. Fission was the result of the unstacking, or the moving a piece from the stack to a space within its traditional movement range. For convenience, Zweidorff allowed the pawns to de-stack or fission sideways, although they normally move only forward. This served to make his two second level pieces more interchangable, and more generally flexible. But it was a concession of consistency. Still, how else could pawns form defenders on the first rank? The rank that had at all costs to be defended?
To illustrate the morphology of his game, he considered a starting state of 27 pawns, the atoms at the root of all the pieces. Each player would take his first turns to fuse his pawns into a desired army, pseudo-continuously with an opponent doing the same. A test run of this displayed its limitations. It wasn't exciting to open a game so slowly. A better idea seemed to be starting the game off with no pawns at all, but at the least with all second tier pieces. These at least could fuse into Lances and Stones. Or into the O piece (third tier) which fused with itself to become any fourth tier piece.
Particle Joust was morphological, which was grand, and pseudo-omnidirectional. It was pseudo to the degree that it allowed sidereal movement. Certain pieces could potentially never advance. True, they could not move backward, but they could also avoid advancement. This was fine for a game that rewarded aggression, whose goal was a safe landing on the farthest rank, but it was still a concession. To maximize the poetry of the "directional theme," Mr. Zweidorff finally abolished sidereal movement. This was the birth of Interpenetration.
Interpenetration was also related to A Vision by Yeats, and to the Star of David, as well as perhaps to Plato, and philosophy and mysticism in general. It was also a hermaphroditic alchemical metaphor. The Royal Hermaphrodite. The Tetractys of Pythagoras, as "10" is the juxtaposition of penis and vagina, or yang and yin, etc.
But all this was hardly necessary to enjoy the game as a game. Zweidorff was torn between making Interpenetration a wraparound game or a final rank game, or even a flag-king-based Stratego-Chess game. If he allowed a wraparound, the game could be conceived of as two rivers of pieces running through one another in opposite directions. Just as good, it could be thought of as Alternating Current, the type of electricity that powers our daily lives.
And because movement is turned based rather than continuous, alternating current is the most accurate analogy. Interpenetration was still morphological, as this morph-element was too exciting to abandon.
When Zweidorff eliminated sidereal movement from Particle Joust, and yet kept his already developed pieces, he was of course required to edit these same pieces. The M, which is was completely sideways piece, was simply abolished. The W was now no different than the O. He thought the V could be re-instated. It was now the I and the V that were the basic pieces. And the W was the sum of these, being both visually and dynamically their sum. The O, devoid of its sideways movement, was exactly the same as the W. So the O would now take the role of the new W-style Theta. The O was a W that moved twice, possibly changing directions. He still wasn't sure if he should allow it to capture twice.
The L-jumping pieces did not need changing, but only gain relative power as other pieces lost some mobility.
The Spirit piece lost significant power, but such is life. On the other hand, a lack of sideways movement might make pieces in general more vulnerable to the Spirit. And it was possible to allow the Spirit a W move thru empty space.
The Mirror piece was the same, really, although it mirror only forward moves, rather than forward and/or sideways moves. The Kerf, or the Nonlinear, or call it what you will, perhaps gained power. As adjacent pieces were perhaps more likely, blockages more expected.
A player could win Interpenetration by damning up his opponents movement. If an opponent cannot move, he loses. It's that simple. Move or die. Like a shark. Interpenetration is Shark Joust.
If he allowed a wraparound in the forward/backward dimension, this would require a teleport from the far end of the board to the near end. Perhaps from the final to the first rank. This would make the edge ranks quite important, as the enemy cannot capture a player's pieces on the player's 7th (for example) or the enemies 1st. This is because no pieces can move sideways. And the Red player's teleport home is simultaneously the home rank of the Black pieces. So possession of these squares becomes important. A place ripe for ambush, mergers, the staging of an offense. And this leaves the middle area of the board as a neutral zone, where pieces on both sides are at their most vulnerable.
This sort of Interpenetration could be played either to annihilation or the capture of the King-piece, provided for the occasion. Another possibility was to have one and only one static piece, a piece that would serve as the Flag serves in Stratego. Both defenders and attackers of this Flag could only defend or attack it in passing. Yes, certain pieces can not-move, of course, of other pieces are moved instead, and this is the crux of the drama. To force moves becomes important in Interpenetration. And the Non piece, which functions as does a Blockade in Parcheesi, is possibly essential. The Non is created by the Merger of On pieces. On plus On equals Non. 1 + 1 = 0.
When Zweidorff saw the movement patterns of the Gold and the Silver in Shogi, he thought of fighting fish. They were much better pieces forward than they were backward. So he stripped the backward moves from these fighting fish, and that was Particle Joust. But then he saw that the sideways moves were still a compromise, and stripped these away also. This was Interpenetration, and is also, excepting Kings, Checkers.
A Note On Influences:
From Chess, the obvious omnidirectional form of varied pieces, and the notion of a King to be captured. Chess + Stratego = Stress.
From Chess, the omnidirectionality. From Stratego, the creative choice as to which pieces to begin the game with.
Then there was Drop Stress or Morph Stress (or just Morff). This was an introduction of the promotion as well as the drop element of Shogi, and yet also a new element. The morph element, if allowed without limits both for fusion and fission, makes all pieces the organs of a single piece. The king is not a piece on the board but all pieces on the board that the player controls. The player exists as a system of pieces, and this system can take different forms. But we've explored this already.
As our hero was editing Stress/Particle Joust pieces for Interpenetration, he was struck by the thought of a 3 dimensional board. Pieces would still move only forward, but also up or down (necessarily diagonally). This was a mind bend, as it gave the Theta piece some crazy potency. Well, it was only a step to 4 dimensions, or 11. But these would not be playable, unless....
Unless the game was mostly 2 dimensional with limited squares that were 3 or 4 dimensional. This was easily achieved by the limited junction of the 2 different 2 dimensional zones at a 4 dimensional junction. Or 7 two-dimensional zones could be junctioned for 14 dimensions, and so on. Or...
And then it hit him. Why not go "down" to One Dimension. He had read that nice book Flatland, and here he was composing Chess for Lineland, which as any good reader knows its a place visited by A Square in that same book.
He now had to edit his precious pieces once again. Backwards movement was already gone long since. Sideways movement had been removed after. All that was left was diagonal movement. Just as the elimination of sideways movement had make the W equivalent to the O, so did the elimination of the diagonal movement make the I equivalent to the W. Nice!
But what could one do with the L-jumpers? It was simple really. They now just jumped straight head, which became quite important in a monodimensional game. The L-jumpers were now just I-jumpers.
The Mirror was still the mirror, although less threatened. The Killer piece was still the killer piece, except he now had to be allowed to move in a linear fashion. He became purely about cost now, and not at all about shape, excepting the necessary juxtaposition of his targets both friendly and opposed.
The positron, as a jumper, was still quite feasible, but not as exciting perhaps. So maybe one could allow the positron to alternate between eating a friend and an enemy. This would give it its glory back. It could still make amazing moves, if the pieces were aligned right.
The Spirit was perhaps more glorious in one dimension, as the problem of being in one's own way reaches a maximum here. The Spirit likes pieces in its way, for pieces are its way. The Spirit was born for monodimensionality.
The Spirit, the Non, the Positron, the Slayer, the On...what else?
The Theta is still possible, and especially if one allows it to move both forwards and backwards. (Yes, Interpenetration can now justify backward movement, as long as the One Dimension is circular. To go forwards is also to go backwards. But for poetic reasons, most pieces should still be strongly faced, directional, etc. This gives the Theta its charm.) So the Theta can move and capture twice. Making it still quite dangerous at close range, and dangerous to "protected" pieces and the pieces that "protect" them. For the Theta scoops them both up.
We cannot forget the Lance or the Rook or the Queen. For in One Dimension, the Rook is the Bishop is the Queen. Infinite movement is infinite movement. The only possible distinction is whether or not the piece is faced, or bidirectional. It might be nice to have both. The two-faced piece would be like the Double Delta, something quite expensive. This would be the Queen. The other unidirectional piece would serve as the Lance. Call them what you will. This gives us a respectable set.
A recent idea was the use of only one colored piece in order to represent all others. This could be done by the use of stacking. So a stack would get its movement/identity from nothing but the number of homogenous pieces within its stack. And fission would just be the movement of pieces off the stack.
It occurred to Mr. Zweidorff, that the pieces could unstack according the movement pattern of their associate sub-stack. If 3 pieces were to jump off a stack of 7, then these 3 pieces could indeed jump, assuming that the 3-stack was equivalent to the jumper.
If the Non was a stack of 2, and the Jump was a stack of a 3, then a stack of 5 could fission into a Non and a Jump, by means of its top three pieces jumping (as one Jump piece) off the stack, over the forward adjacent space. This would leave behind two chips, which would instantaneously become the Non. In a One Dimensional game, where pieces are in one another's way, a more flexible merging-system is perhaps desirable. A smart player is master of merging. Merging is movement is attack is defense. Some brilliant moves are made possible. But the merge/promotion system must be perfectly designed. This is the tricky part. We don't want the stacks too high. We want maximum flexibility. Trial and error are perhaps the best method for designing this system.
The board could be a nice circular track. The pieces could be something like checkers, but perhaps not as tall and more interlocking, to allow for easier stacking. Most of each player pieces would be moving in the same direction. A few could move relatively backwards, and therefore take the enemy from behind. Of course two circles could be joined at a 2-dimensional junction space, and this could also be nice. Or there could be 2-junction spaces. This would give us parallel dimensions. The junction spaces would be like the meeting of railroad tracks, or places where pieces could move between dimensions. Pieces on such squares would be more threatening as well as more threatened.
What is the goal? Was ist die Wesen? (guessing on "Wesen"). The goal is to create a platform for competitive creativity. Or in some cases just creativity. Mr. Zweidorff likes the idea of Stress problems being composed and solved by others. Stress pieces are more complicated than those of Chess.
+++
It's the next day, and our author is high. He has tested some games and found them wanting, probably because he is playing against himself and also it was just too much number-space crunching. It's about the god damned poetry. Perhaps his games will be better for Problem Art than actually playing. But that would not be good. An absurd obsession perhaps. Just like math, it is conceptual art.
The pieces are little machines. Little abstract/conceptual tools that exist as part of a system of tools. A piece has a value in relation to other pieces. Any non contingent value approximations are useful and perhaps even necessary, but also deceptive as to the nature of the game.
We have 3 basic ways in which to make a piece valuable in a move/capture game like chess, etc. We can give it more speed, more turning radius, or some special ability.
The On, the Non, the Son, the Ton, the Con. The One and the Fun and the Done. And the Gone.
The name of the game is On. The name of the basic piece is "On." An On in the heart of the game. But what is an On? Is an On a Pawn?
Should the game be about capture, or just about movement? A nice twist. Perhaps the object is to jam up the opponent. Move or lose. And pieces perhaps could morph but neither capture nor be captured.
Maybe Drop Stress is the way to go. A Stress with drops wherein pieces can only move if they can capture. This puts the emphasis on the drops. This makes dropped pieces more vulnerable to dropping pieces. From there, one could play it 2 ways. Either the captured pieces are used/dropped as one's own, or pieces are gradually annihilated, as in Chess.
A player has 9 or 7 or 17 pieces, and drops his choice of piece into his choice of position. In a game like this, pieces can be dropped where they are most potent, and the lack of starting positions will keep the game fresh. No players will have the same game. As they will choose different pieces. Or they can commit to using the same pieces according to taste.
This reduces or at least changes the number crunching aspect. We like to dream up attacks, not do the drudgework. The drop is surgical.
The drop ties us to Go and Shogi. But in other ways we are dealing with Chess, as this game is omnidirectional. To maximize creative possibilities, and also because a game like this gives neither player a home territory. True, a player may choose to cluster his pieces, but that is according to taste.
This game could hang on the wall like a painting. Magnetic letters could serve as pieces. Both players could view the game comfortably from the same angle. This is a reverse of Interpenetration. Or perhaps its fulfillment. The opponents interpenetrate within a cloud of one another's pieces.
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