There was a young guy streaming with an older guy (beard and glasses (possibly named Dave (not Dave89))) several months back. He mentioned a variant where one color begins with a solid square perimeter already surrounding, I think he said, 13 lines. The older guy says “Oh, you’re talking about skyboxing; we did that in university but back in my day we did it with 9x9.” If the underdog makes a living group inside, they win, regardless of points.
I got to thinking about it - seems like a fun variant, maybe as a training exercise for people wanting to practice either invading or defending a large area. Allowing for game setup with variable size skyboxes could facilitate a natural handicap effect.
It’s not really a Go variant I suppose, just Goesque.
Something like this? It looks like there’s quite a few “White to Live” variants described at Sensei’s library.
As always, there’s an open invitation to implement this at govariants.com, but actually I think this variant can be played just as well at OGS using the “Fork game” feature. Of course black needs to agree to resign once white lives, but I don’t see an easy way around that regardless of the server!