That’s fair, but then at some point N players on a board with N^2 points won’t look as bad I’d say 
(it probably wouldn’t be playable though)
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Also, two players could have the board equally divided, with the last dame being the only point to play. Since both will continuously block it, it will be a draw.
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Well actually… What if one of them happens to have filled in slightly more of their territory? That is, on area its a draw, but one of the players has one stone more. Then that player will win, because while they are colliding… hang on, I forgot that when they collide, they still get to place at their second choices. That should solve it, so it still becomes a draw.
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It did make me thing about this new elimination rule. Imagining both players have equal area (N^2-1)/2, with 1 being the dame, but different numbers of stones filled in their own territory because the game has a history where other players where eliminated.
The player with more stones can afford to keep playing at the dame longer, while the player with less stones eventually has to place a new stone to avoid getting eliminated by te turn count.
But I guess you’re right. When they collide the player with less stones can add a new stone to catch up and it should eventually even out the number of placed stones? Probably be at worst a Seki on the board.
See what le_4TC wrote above: after the collision you can still place a stone in your own area.
This would only be a problem if one of the players has more groups than the other, since there is a group tax (you have to keep two eyes open).
So it looks like both even and odd boards have the same possibility to arrive at a draw.
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Yeah I suppose with multiple groups there could in theory be a complicated Scenario where there was a difference of placed stones, and actually placing a new stone would actually fill eyes of a group to make it killable.
Imagining having lots of two eyed groups adjacent/surrounded by enemy stones and the edge of the board.
No, no, it just means that your life utility function has a strong preference for playing on boards with tengen.
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slightly irrational life utility
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My personal life utility function was severely negative for any attempts to add more hoshi marks.
Also, it would’ve been more work to code 
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Soooo what are we waiting for? :3
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I’m not opposed to starting a bit earlier, if we’re all in agreement about the rules. It looks like we have 8 players, 5 of which have voted for 13x13.
For time controls, Vsotvep has suggested 24h/round, with an automatic extension for an extra 24h if some player hasn’t submitted a move. I’m fine with this, as long as all players move within 24h whenever they can (if most rounds take 48h that slows the game down a lot).
For elimination, the current proposal is that you are eliminated after x rounds if you have fewer than x/2 - 3 stones on the board. This roughly means that you’re eliminated if more than half of your stones are captured.
A side effect is that we no longer need a special rule to handle repetitions.
For objective, the current proposal is that you should aim to stay in the game longer than as many other players as possible. The outcome of the game is thus a ranking of the players, something like this:
1st place: Player A
3rd place: Player B
3rd place: Player C
4th place: Player D
Here player D was eliminated first, B and C were eliminated on the same round (note that they share 3rd place rather than 2nd), and A stayed in the longest.
Naturally, the “voting for resign/draw” from the first game is replaced by a possibility to propose a ranking, and if all players agree, the game can be ended without playing it out. I think this could be easily handled by making a poll in the public communication thread (perhaps a player should privately suggest a ranking to the referee, who will then post the poll, so that it’s clear that it is official and binding). We should discuss the details about this but it doesn’t seem super important.
For communication, we will allow private communication between groups of players of arbitrary size.
Apart from that, we’re keeping the rules from the first game. Each player submits up to three (unique, ordered by preference) choices per move. Collision with existing stones is allowed (there was some uncertainty about this earlier, does anyone want to tweak this? Personally I think the mechanic is good, but it’s a bit strange to just choose an arbitrary stone on the board, maybe you could submit XX or something to indicate an intentional collision. The only difference in practice would be that you could also use it on the very first move). We’re using simultaneous capture, with a distinction between “old” and “new” chains.
Hopefully that covers most of it. We should make a new official rules document before starting the game (probably just taking the very thorough original rules from yebellz and modifying the relevant parts), but I wanted to make this more informal summary to check that we’re all on the same page (and highlight some minor details left to discuss).
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I’m not sure I understand the distinction between sharing second place and sharing third place. Why pick the lower of the two?
I feel like it looks a bit odd calling something joint second place with no first place if it was the case that the last two players were eliminated together. I guess you can call a tie no winner but you could equally say they both won.
I guess some options for ordering are mentioned here but I don’t see a reason to pick one over the other necessarily Ranking - Wikipedia
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As I understand it, the player incentives defined by the rules are basically an order of all possible outcomes telling each player which results are preferable compared to others. I believe a shared second place is supposed to be less preferable than a first place, hence it is formulated like this.
I would like to reiterate though that players have the liberty to go against these “guidelines” if they see fit.
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This is just the result of translating the objective “maximize the number of players eliminated before you” into a ranking which can be easily compared between outcomes. As to why we should use this objective rather than “minimize the number of players eliminated after you” (which would result in a shared second place in the example), otherwise everyone could agree to a draw on move 1, and it would be equivalent to everyone winning 
Basically, I think it’s reasonable that going for a decisive result should always be preferable to a draw. In a system with payouts, this happens automatically, but here we need to make sure of it by saying that a 3-way draw is the same as those three players all getting 3rd place, for instance. This makes it so that you should only agree to that 3-way draw if you see no way of getting a better placement for yourself.
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So the idea is to encourage a riskier play to not have a tie.
Say two players will take spots 2,3 and if they play safe they get joint 3rd and if they play risky then maybe it ends up with a 2nd and 3rd place.
In practice though I can’t see this being different to playing safe to get joint 2nd and playing risky to end up 2nd 3rd.
What I mean is, it just seems like a label. If we called it joint 2nd or joint 3rd the outcome is kind of the same without some payout system, prizes or score count/leaderboard that might carry through games.
The player that’s ok with a tie will play safe, and the player who doesn’t want to tie will play a risk regardless of whether we call it joint 2nd or 3rd no?
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Imagine if the other players are voting for a 3-way draw, but you think you could get 2nd place by playing on. What should you do? If we specify a 3-way draw as being equivalent to 1st place, then you should accept the draw. If we specify a 3-way draw as being equivalent to 3rd place, then you should play on.
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To remove the feeling that it is just a label: consider a monetary prize given to each place, then the difference becomes clearer: dividing the prize for the drawn winners means you get less money.
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Somewhere I pointed out that these incentives are relevant as long as players view them as such. The rules don’t try to force players to play in a certain way. For me these are the guidelines that roughly tell players what to strive for. These are the result of lengthy discussions (albeit enjoyable for me), so I personally will do my best to work towards these goals. But it has also been pointed out, that following any incentive guidelines too much deminishes ones ability to make diplomatic threats, or in general negotiation. So I think players shouldn’t feel too bounded by these guidelines, either.
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Nobody has no follow the objective of playing along with the incentives, but it will help to discuss what the optimal strategy is to have a clear and shared goal. Which makes the game more fun in my opinion
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