I’m back with another cooperative/social Go variant designed to be playable over-the-board!
Story
Visualize a 19x19 goban split diagonally into 4 pyramid faces. The goal is for adventurers playing as Black to climb the pyramid using black stones and connect with the Eye of Ra at the top (tengen). White stones represent Egyptian mythological creatures aiming to stop them from doing so.
Rules
Overview
- Capture and placement rules are the same as in regular Go, unless otherwise specified.
- No komi as there is no territory scoring. If you’re playing with a beginner, you may allow them to start with handicap stones.
- Up to 4 players can be on the Black team, with each player assigned to one pyramid face of their choosing. For each additional player on the Black team, White gets an additional move per turn. Only one move is allowed in each pyramid face per turn.
Legal moves
- Starting position: Black must play their first move(s) on the 4th line or below.
- Defender’s burden: Above the 4th line, Black is limited to one-space jumps and stretches from existing Black stones. This includes diagonal stretch and small knight move. Large knight and elephant jump are not allowed.
- This is due to gravity, for storytelling purposes.
- Attacker’s freedom: White is allowed to play freely in any row that Black has previously played at or above.
- Eye of Ra: White is not allowed to play any stones in the 3x3 grid at the center of the board, because it is protected by the Eye of Ra.
- Contact play: Black is allowed to attach to any of White stones at any time. White is also allowed to attach to Black at any time.
- Out of bounds: All moves should be played inside of the pyramid face each player chose at the start of the game.
- However, due to the difficulty of gauging the pyramid bounds on a real-life goban without additional tools or markers, out-of-bounds moves can be allowed and re-evaluated at the end of the game. The player who has the most stones out of bounds is disqualified.
- If there are multiple players on the Black team, it’s up to White to detect any illegal moves. If nobody notices before another move is played, the move becomes legal.
Win conditions
- Black wins by connecting to the top of the pyramid (tengen) with a living structure (i.e. 2 eyes). The living structure counts as connected if it touches the Eye of Ra (tengen) with a diagonal and White has no way to disconnect it via capture.
- If there are multiple players on the Black team, a single group connecting to tengen results in a win.
- White wins if Black resigns or has no more legal moves to play.
Conclusion
The design is a work in progress, but I’m posting it here so some of you can enjoy an early version of it and to gauge interest in an online version of story-based variants like these. Try it out with your kids, go clubs, friends, etc. and let me know if some of the rules are too unbalanced or any suggestions you may have.
There are two main goals of this variant:
- to teach beginners how to make strong shapes and survive an attack
- to be social, a more fun alternative to Rengo supporting up to 5 players (1 vs. 4)
Additional benefits:
- The game is as fast as 9x9 without the hassle of having to do a ton of corner-based tsumego.
Details can be discussed in this forum post if anyone is interested, but I plan to develop it as part of my website later this year anyways, as a mini-game used for teaching fundamentals similar to Atari Go.
Happy new year!
