I looked up that Martian chess and it's a good looking game. You can play it on a folded regular chess board with chess pieces so I'll have to give it a try with my kid. "Colors don't matter" is true, the colors are decorative, both for the pieces and the spaces. You control all the pieces on your half of the board. Pawns move one diagonal any direction, "drones" move two straight any direction, queens move like chess queens. Capturing is like chess. Play ends when a player has no pieces in his side so no move is possible. Then you tote up the pieces you each have taken, pawns worth one, drones two, queens three. You can see how you'd have situations where players are passing a queen back and forth doing massive damage, and that someone might end the game deliberately because they are ahead like gin.

The pieces are called "Icehouse" and they are another invention of the guy who invented the game. The pieces are stackable and there are other games that use the stacking. pyramids - home | Looney Labs You will have to let us know if any more of the games are included with the rules. Most of the other games need a lot more of them, though.

There's a doubles version that uses a whole chessboard. Wikipedia offers up the idea that other numbers of players can play on boards imagined in non-Euclidian space and then does not follow that up, and so far trying to make sense of it has only made my engineer head hurt, so I'm going to leave it alone. It does seem like you could play six on a cube or three on part of a cube, but I don't think that's what they mean