Go Battle Royale: Multi-Color Capture Go

[yebellz]

Since this suggestion was mainly about rules and game design, I wanted to reply to it here, to avoid muddling the game thread with further rules discussion:

@NeilAgg

This leads me to wonder if, in a future game, rules along these lines would be interesting:

1. A player is only eliminated once they have zero stones on the board
2. Groups die when they run out of liberties
3. The game ends when all players pass or one player eliminates all others
4. Final score is determined by territory

That seems like it might be more in-line with “normal” go rules. We would need some kind of ko rule.

I think these changes effectively reverts the game to a typical multi-color Go game. The first rule is probably unlikely to be activated (given that passing is allowed), since players would likely be able to establish at least one living group. While playing multi-color Go is interesting, I think it is a complete departure from the basic premise of this proposed battle royale style of variant, where the aim is to create tense, no-pass Go with elimination on a single capture.

It is worth pointing out that no-pass, capture Go does essentially boil down to a game of territory as well (except with group-tax effects, and some interesting impacts on endgame moves and life/death status), since those with more territory have more space to fill-in before having to self-atari or throw-in stones in imperiled positions elsewhere.

However, for future games, I do think it would be interesting to consider a softening of the capture-elimination rule to basically state something like:

A player is eliminated once X (possible greater than one) of their stones have been captured.

With X at somewhere around maybe 3 to 5, I think the game would still essentially retain its battle royale style of play, except that life/death status is modified a bit, where two solid eyes must be attained to ensure life, rather than relying on a single big eye that would dissuade the suicidal throw-in of a single stone. This would also give players a bit more flexibility to consider some riskier and speculative moves that might create a weak stone or two.

I also liked the random start rule, for creating some asymmetry and chaos, but I think it could perhaps be tweaked and improved a bit. Maybe only randomly place two stones per player, ensure that they are in opposite quadrants, and check that no two stones are adjacent, none are on the first or central lines. With 8 players, maybe also ensure that each quadrant is balanced.