For more games by Fergus Duniho, goto http://www.duniho.com/fergus/games

As a Brain, you would love to shut yourself away in your Ivory Tower, contemplate eternal truths, and let your loyal Toadies attend to your mundane, corporeal needs. If only it weren't for the incessant nattering of the hoi polloi, a bunch of Numskulls, Yahoos, Clodhoppers, Fuddy-Duddies, and Ninnies. Unable to fathom the true joys of reflection and contemplation, they just flitter about, interrupting your cerebral reveries with silly inanities. You find it hard to believe you could even be the same species. They are surely relatives of monkeys, and you are just as surely the handiwork of a higher power. But they're not the worst of the lot. They may never comprehend the life of the mind, but they have some faint idea that you are their superior. The worst of the lot is that pretentious, condescending know-it-all who thinks he is better than you. What an utter fool! Even your Toadies, as simple as they are, have the wisdom to recognize their own ignorance and place unwavering faith in your brilliance, but this vainglorious know-it-all lacks even that much wisdom. He even has the audacity to call himself a Brain. If it weren't for these pests, you could live a life of unadulterated intellectual bliss. But what can you do about them? Being the true genius that you are, you have a brilliant plan to kill two birds with one stone. You will unite the hoi polloi around the cause of taking down your enemy, that infuriating quasi-intellectual poser. With their simple minds, they are easily led, and this war effort will keep them too busy to bother you. You laugh at how you will have the impostor Brain bested by mere simpletons, the very hoi polloi who are intellectual mites compared to you. Knowing his comeuppance is at hand, you serenely retire to your Ivory Tower.

Storm the Ivory Tower is a synthesis of Smess and Chinese Chess. The basic idea behind Smess is that arrows on squares determine which directions pieces may move. Storm the Ivory Tower applies this idea to the structure of Chinese Chess. It includes Smess-like equivalents of every piece in Chinese Chess, and it has an Ivory Tower on each side of the board, which is its counterpart to the palace in Chinese Chess. This is a new version of the game. It includes a redesigned board, which now includes a river and a different configuration of arrows, and it redefines powers of movement for three pieces. Overall, the changes make the game less drawish and more analogous to Chinese Chess.

This latest version of the ZRF includes a renamed piece, a recolored Smess-style board, redrawn Smess-style pieces, a bug fix, and in response to user demand, five alternate boards and piece sets. The piece sets are mainly borrowed from my Chinese Chess ZRF. They feature Chinese and western versions of the Chinese Chess pieces. The new boards avoid the child-like appearance of Smess by using uniform arrow designs with simpler or classier color schemes. These should appeal to people who prefer the look of All the King's Men to Smess. Although I am not of that camp and wasn't initially excited about the prospect of adding new boards, I am very pleased with how the alternate boards came out. Thanks go to Michael Howe and Larry Lynn Smith, who both submitted arrow designs that I made use of in making the new boards.