![[Board diagram]](pic/marsboard2.gif)
Not too much to say about this. I had a particularly long stretch of painful waiting time at work. So I wrote this.
I also sporked a lot of vampires, but that's a different story.
The board prints out on four pages. I had to make it that large so that an Icehouse piece could be placed on a single square, lying down.
You may want to trim the borders off and glue the quarter-boards to a large sheet of posterboard.
...Martian Chess, Martian Go, and no doubt any number of other games with this board. Well, you could play chess and checkers too, but where's the pyramids in that?
The intermingled landscapes of craters and dunes (okay, very regular dunes) was distantly inspired by Escher.
The pattern of dunes and craters is 180-degree symmetrical around the center. I originally intended to print out a single quarter-board page, so that it would be 90-degree symmetrical. But -- as I realized, much too late for my own ego -- that plan is flawed, if you want black and white squares to alternate properly.
The pyramid in the center is a top-down view of a fractal -- I've forgotten the name, but it's the three-dimensional version of the Sierpinski Triangle. [Footnote: I guess it's just called a Sierpinski Pyramid. Only I used a square pyramid instead of a tetrahedron, of course.] It's only iterated three levels deep; that's enough to make the point.
Last updated December 31, 1999.