I’m brand new to this game. I’m trying to play against the computer on a 9x9 board and when I hit ‘Play’ (or ‘Create’ or whatever) it says “game offer rejected”
How can the computer reject my game offer? This is really holding me back from wanting to give this game a shot if it’s this difficult to simply create a game. Giant bar to entry.
All of the bots are independently hosted by users, not the server itself.
Please check the profile page for the specific bot you are trying to challenge as many of them have specific time, rank or board size restrictions.
Hello, and welcome 
yeah the experience is still a little clunky with the robots 
if you don’t wanna click through all the profiles you should find most of the AI restrictions here: AI Game Restrictions
Or just play against humans 
Actually as a new player I would even recommend a few games against humans. Unlike robots we can quickly tell you the most basic mistakes and wrong approaches you are doing. There is a lot of people here happy to help out beginners (as others helped us…) do not be afraid to ask. Once you get the hang of things, you can practice your newly gained knowledge on robots And there is also quite a few interesting go apps for android if you like that sort of things
If you really want to play against a computer, try Cosumi (cosumi.net/en)
In fact, I think it’s fair to say that OGS isn’t a place to come to try playing computers - there are plenty of apps you can download for that.
More, OGS is a place to play people (not entirely, but primarily)
GaJ
Cosumi is a pretty weak AI, I’d estimate somewhere around 9k, or so. I played 0 handicap against it and won by 61.5. Compared to similarly strong OGS bots, it doesn’t fight as aggressively, and generally has a more passive playstyle. It has decent direction of play, but doesn’t do things like continue ko fights or try to punish invasions.
Honestly, OGS is probably the best place to play bots, unless you want to download a client. It keeps a game record, you can replay your games, and there’s a fairly diverse set of bots to choose from, with different strengths and weaknesses. Cosumi might be decent for someone trying to learn the game, but OGS is better for everything after that.
I do think it would be a good enhancement for the bots to say why they reject game requests. Some of them do this, right now, but it would be best to either have an informative message, or just grey out certain options on the settings page based on the bot selected, such that the player wouldn’t be able to generate an invalid game request. It’s not tough to figure out how to set up games with the bots, but I can understand new players coming in and having trouble getting started, as a result of this issue. Given how often this seems to show up in the forums, it might be worth some code.
Lovely to see how minusGo didn’t play >10k back in December, “considering how weak it is”.
I recommend not bothering with the bots here, and instead just download and build a ui with either ELF or Leela Zero. Then play against it a few thousand times, quitting and starting a new game when your win rate falls below 20% (as a beginner, you’ll find this happens within about 15-20 moves, meaning you can go through a lot of games pretty fast), until you can manage to consistently keep your win rate above 40% for more than 75 moves, and ipso presto you can suddenly play fuseki and chuuban like a top pro.