What if you want to play another person on the same computer but you don’t want to use the demo board because you want the features of the of regular board? (eg forking the game, pauses, score estimate…)
Is this possible?
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As far as I know you would need to use different browsers (or instances of browsers keeping their own data especially cookies).
Really? I would think it’d be just a regular game except you would play both black and white.
You can’t play against yourself (i.e. an account can’t play against itself).
Why not use a free sgf-editor like “MultiGo” instead?
So all the Go is in one spot. But yeah, it’s not necessary.
A hot seat variant would be nice, I like the idea, I hope the developers will maybe keep it in their mind.
When I play RL friends, I play unrated. This is so I play teaching games instead of playing to win. Demo boards, black versus white, work great for this.
With the cost of stones so cheap on Amazon and a board can be made from your nearest home hardware store, why would you go for computer play in person if it’s not for teaching?
Not shooting down the idea. I’m just curious about your reasoning.
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To SunPin: The regular board has some features that the demo board doesn’t provide. I think that if these features could be used on the same machine, it would be useful (ie tablet). I don’t usually carry a Go Board with me, but I do usually have my laptop. So if I wanted to play a quick 9x9 game with a friend, then I could do so fairly easily. I could also download MultiGo, but as I said it could be nice if all the Go is in one spot.
Concerning tablets: There are several Apps out there for playing on a tablet, which is even preferable to a laptop because you use it tapping with fingers, lying on the table - very close to playing OTB.
The only valid argument for playing “local” Go via OGS is “all the Go in one place”.
…but most such “local” games are quick or teaching games, so why the urge to archive them on OGS?
(Have the folder of your games synced in a cloud and you have them everywhere, too - remember OGS needs internet connectivity, too…)
Except for the OGS-archiving everything can be done equally easy via tablet or laptop - and you don’t need an internet connection either…
From my personal and private POV the advantage of a “local OGS” over already existing solutions is so minute that I even don’t regard it as a real advantage.
(And I really did teach Go more than once in a pub using a free Go-App on my smartphone… 
)
Sorry for bumping this old thread but I faced the same issue when trying to play quick games with friends, and I couldn’t find a solution other than the demoboard (which lacks the usual features, such as automatic scoring).
Since this is from 2014, I just wanted to check if the situation has somehow evolved since then ? Playing on the same screen sounds like quite a simple feature (which is common for chess).
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It depends on what you want to know.
Looking back at the OP, demo boards have
- a score estimator which I believe is a katago score estimator, so quite reliable.
- you can fork the game from a demo board.
Pauses doesn’t really make sense since there isn’t a clock so I don’t know if somehow a demo board had a clock back then.
That said me saying “the katago estimate is reliable” assumes that one is katago, and isn’t leaving weaknesses in a position which the bot can spot but players of different levels might not, namely
It’s not quite the same issue with marking “dame” weirdly but probably similar idea.
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Thanks - I was rather having in mind the automatic scoring of the game once both players pass, like an actual game, with the AI graph and all. Absent that, I guess we can score the game using the score estimator, with the caveats you mention.
I agree pauses are not necessary in this format.
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Other than that I’m not sure of other alternate ideas, forking the game doesn’t let you challenge yourself.
If one didn’t want to download a go editor like sabaki or the KGS client etc one could use @yebellz’s in browser editor
https://yewang.github.io/besogo/
Maybe a very basic/manual score estimator with a flood fill+ marking dead stones could be a feature request, if it isn’t already there.
Edit: it has been requested actually
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