Collective development of a server for variants

I’m excited to tell you that we’ve recently added Rengo in a way that it works in combination with any of the currently[1] available variants! Kindof like a variant modifier.
Our implementation uses the subvariant as a blackbox[2], and replaces each of its player slots by a team of multiple players. The team members alternate playing moves for the corresponding player slot in the subvariant in cyclic order.

For example you could play Rengo-Chess, which I guess means that we’re now also a chess variant site :laughing:

What I find exciting about it, is that (in theory) you can really use any subvariant, whether it has alternative sequential move order like Thue-Morse Go or parallel moves like Fractional Go. Even rengo is a possible subvariant to itself (though all that does is make the teams bigger). Internally we’ve called the concept “higher order variant”[3].

Full disclosure: I have not tested all possible subvariants, so :crossed_fingers: hopefully nothing breaks!

Here’s a breakdown of the config form for creating a rengo game:

You can freely experiment with it in the demo view.

Here are some further ideas for adding “higher order variants” in future: Pie Rule, Miai Go, Democratic Go


  1. and future :crossed_fingers: ↩︎

  2. using only the base interface shared by all variants ↩︎

  3. inspired by higher order functions thanks to @benjito ↩︎

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