Redstone

Go Variants
1

Redstone is a variation of Go in which red stones are used to capture. Redstones are permanent. They cannot themselves be captured.

http://www.marksteeregames.com/Redstone_rules.pdf

I designed Redstone in 2012. Recently I programmed two of my games for Board Game Arena. Now I’ve started on Redstone. So it should be available to play within a month. I ordered Go stones from Japan to photograph but they’ve been stopped in Korea for the past week.

Kerry Handscomb of Abstract Games magazine has investigated and written about Redstone recently. His article should be available soon in the online version of the magazine. I’ll post a link later.

Meanwhile, he said via email…

“An interesting feature of Redstone is the emergent objective. You might think at first that it comes down to territory, but it doesn’t. Number of eyes is the key. Number of eyes is much more opaque than points of territory. This opaqueness is what to fight over in the play, so that the number of eyes becomes clear finally. This difference with Go should also influence choice of best [board] size, in my opinion, because a long initial period of staking out swathes of territory is Go, not Redstone.”

9 Likes
2

This sounds really interesting… also like that it has a hard stop condition similar to chess, which works well in some situations where a vague end is complicated. Good luck with its future development :slight_smile:

1 Like
3

Very cool idea! I’d love to try this out

2 Likes
4

Thanks for the feedback. Here is the link for issue 21 (page 51).

There will be more about Redstone in issue 22.

2 Likes
5

Oh so because you can’t pass you eventually have to fill in your own eyes like stone scoring, except further because somebody will eventually have to self atari with no passes available,

I thought initially one might be able to just start dropping red stones in eyes, but it’s only bounding/capturing moves that are red.

It does sound very interesting.

1 Like
6

Yes, that’s correct.

Thanks :slight_smile:

My Go stones started moving again. I hope to have them soon.

I’m contemplating board dimensions for 9x9, 13x13, and 19x19 boards. I think the 9x9 and 13x13 should have a height of 750px. This will fit on most screens. But the 19x19 should have a height of around 900px. This will necessitate scrolling, but with smaller dimensions the stones will be too tiny.

Would there be any possibility of having Redstone here at Online Go?

1 Like
7

It would be cool to have variants at Ogs.

If it doesn’t happen there’s always the Variant Go Server

https://go.kahv.io/

In theory one can contribute to it on GitHub - JaniM/variant-go-server: The virtual home of go variants.

One could ask @seequ for some help too on what might be possible :slight_smile:

4 Likes
8

Thanks for the information.

9

Since OGS sadly doesn’t even have rengo yet, it seems highly unlikely we would support redstone, but i would LOVE to see it get supported over on variant go server as mentioned above! Best of luck with pursuing that :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
10

Thanks for the feedback and advice, everyone.