Well, I'm not on Blogger, so I couldn't post my reply there, but your starting setup looked odd to me. Which is OK, but I'm used to having all the caps starting on the diagonal.
And not to be picky or anything, but that's not a "Volcano" set up - that's a Megavolcano (6x6) set up. And from what I remember, there really is no "standard" set up for Megavolcano - you just put the caps on top of the red nests wherever they might be.
But where the caps are at to start with is sometimes less of an issue - because to me, the person who can control cap movement (move the caps all over the board without any eruptions) is the master Volcano player.
has anyone else tried the "caps go away when they land in the dirt?" variant? That sounds cool!
Carol
On 12/3/06, TheLoneGoldfish
<thelonegoldfish@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Michael's idea sounds neat. I'll assume that dropping a cap to bare dirt counts as your move though (else it will be a rather sudden game of lemmings at the end).
As for the 5x5x5 board, umm... It seems like a neat idea, but would be really hard to visualize moves (and I already have a friend that takes a half hour on a normal 3d board). Now if you could get some magnetic pyramids and play on the faces of a cube... that I think would be neat. (or, use two sets of 3 player martian chess boards... except that would be 4x4 instead of 5x5).
Other ideas/questions I've been having:
Has anyone devised an opening move whereby the second player does not get 2 pyramids? I havn't proven it yet, but I feel with 5 pyramids you can make a move from any position you wish, no matter what the initial setup is...
Hmm... actually. let me see. I may have one, but I havn't stared at it on a board so umm... it may not work out. (opens OOo Draw, wishing he had a scanner instead) Instead of attaching, I think I'll just throw it up on a blogger post.
http://sharperkelp.blogspot.com/2006/12/volcano-safe-opening-move.html
That's it for now,
-Evan