Old Board Game 4D TIME LORDS by J A BALL & CO 1980 PROTOTYPE: THE STORY

I recently sold an old game to a chap. The game and the chap turned out to have a story and he has kindly shared it with the blog:

"I was at A-level stage in about 1979/1980, and despite trying to do boring school stuff, I was also one of the fist people in the UK to build my own home computers and program them, and this was before you could buy any type of off he shelf 'home computer. There wasn’t much you could do with them as there wasn’t an established market for games or software. So I used to have to program my own games, in machine code or basic. I was a keen addict at the local games arcade, so writing space invaders and asteroids was an obvious target. Myself and a few of my friends formed a weird little group that would now be called the geeksquad or similar (!) and we all used to get involved with unusual activities, often with the school teachers encouraging our little group to do things that all the 1,500 kids couldn’t be bothered to take interest in.

The teachers at school kept an interest in what we were doing, because no one knew anybody who was doing anything like it. But we also used to play various board games, like chess and Halma. One day our maths teacher ( A Mrs Ball …) approached me and a few friends who played chess, and told us how one of her relatives had invented a new kind of chess with a 'star trek' style time-warp / time-delay element built in. If you look at the original 1966 Star trek series, you will sometimes see Spock playing a weird looking version of chess with a variety of platforms up one side of the board. It was a kind of 3D chess board. Pieces get moved onto the platforms and shifted along one platform per turn, or something like that. Eventually they pop out of their "time warp" and can be placed back on the main board somehow. I am convinced that the chap who invented 4D was inspired by both chess and the star trek version. Anyway, we were all asked to play the game a few times according to the rules he had set, although he wanted feedback as to any good ideas to improve things or comments on things that were annoying. We all found the game quite good fun. But I never knew what happened to it after it went to market, so seeing it on ebay the other day was great, and off course I bought it.

So, there you go. A tale of 4D from 30 yrs ago! cheers, A.M"