Yes you can…
To play on OGS the board has to be represented flat. This can be done by playing on a 14x18 grid and using that part of the board that would be cut out to fold into a cube:
The unused lines around the outside, rows 1&18, columns A&O are there to prevent stones registering as captured when they are not but that still leaves the issue of stones that have been captured in a way that doesn’t register:
The marked white stone captures the two black stones at D4&D5. Black can then capture the marked stone by playing at D5. There are two ways to deal with this issue.
The first approach is to use the OGS board as a kifu and clock only. When a move is played that doesn’t register properly a note is made in the chat window. eg: White mv 20 at F7 captures D4-5 or if it can’t be played at all then a stone is placed in one of the empty corners to register the move. The top-left for black and the top-right for white. eg: if black wishes to play 21 at D5, he places the stone at A18 to trigger the clock and writes ‘black mv 21 at D5 capturing F7’ or similar.
The second approach is to use a demo board and transfer control after each move. This has large advantages in being able to correctly represent the board position. However; the disadvantages of using a demo board are that:
- There are no reminders of it being your turn. You won’t find the game by clicking on the circled number near notifications.
- All time controls are lost. There are none.
- The game doesn’t appear in the active game list and for one player, won’t appear on their profile page at all. Transferring control doesn’t make the game appear in the ‘Reviews and Demos’ list of whoever’s turn it is. It remains solely in the list of it’s creator.
Either way I strongly, very strongly, extremely strongly recommend using a cardboard and pencil copy of the board right from the beginning. I marked one face with an arrow between G3 and H4 as a reference point and extreme care needs to be taken when copying the moves so as to not spoil the game.
The ability to run in any direction from anywhere on the board makes captures fairly few and so I think the best approach is to use a normal board as a kifu/clock and then transfer to a demo board (using ‘review this game’ from the side-bar) only if necessary.
Does it work? Is it worth the effort? Yes!
Here’s my first and only game so far:
I am particularly grateful to @yebellz for joining me in this experiment and for seeing the flaws in my implementation before we even started. As it turns out we were able to play the whole game without using a demo board or switching to ‘kifu’ mode.
