Simple Lentear(Go) Rules

When one side runs out of stones, they lose, if both run out of stones, they win. When your opponent runs out of stones, the amount of stones you have left added to two times the number of groups you have on the board more than the opponent is equal to the amount of territory you have more than your opponent.

When one side runs out of stones, they lose, if both run out of stones, they win. When your opponent runs out of stones, the amount of stones you have left added to two times the number of groups you have on the board more than the opponent is equal to the amount of territory you have more than your opponent.

That said, I guess it should be, ā€˜white has 180 stones and half a stone is taken from that and placed in the prisoners lid, leaving 179.5 stonesā€™

No ruleset without draws could qualify as olympic in my book. :stuck_out_tongue:

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So if Black is less than 13 points ahead on the board, they lose the game?

I think perhaps you should put only 4 black stones in the lid initially. It looks like those count double, in a way.

Draws are still possible if there is a seki

Oh, Iā€™m not sure how that is!

Letā€™s say black and white each put 174 stones on opposite sides of the board. When black runs out of stones, white will have 6 stones and half a stone left, meaning white wins by six-and-half points. Alternatively you could count the difference in black and white prisoners, and that will also give you a white win by 6.5 points!

But why should white win in this situation?
Imagine if Black surrounds an area of 185 intersections. White surrounds the remaining area, of 176 intersections. With Chinese rules, Black is ahead by 9 points on the board, so Black wins by 1.5 points after komi.
But with your rules, both players will fill their territory, until theyā€™ve both played a total of 174 moves. Then Black still has 11 remaining intersections of territory. White has only 2 remaining intersections of territory, just enough to have two eyes. Then Black loses because Black has run out of stones. And you declare that white is winning by 6.5 points in this situation?!

Here is the situation Iā€™m talking about:

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In that instance, before blackā€™s last move under the rules black has four more groups than white which gives eight points, so black wins by 1.5, and while itā€™s true after the last move two points are lost, itā€™s the case that the last move isnā€™t possible since that would be blackā€™s 175th stone, so letā€™s discount that. By 347 black could have arranged the stones so that there were five groups more groups than white to win by 2.5, which is the territory score. In fact if 347 was at E5 black would win by more.

If both sides play optimally to maximise the amount of groups in their territory and minimise the amount of the opponentā€™s groups in the opponentā€™s territory, the score should equate territory scoring.

In other words, connecting groups in your own territory loses points.

I think you are ultimately proposing a Go variant that behaves very differently than any of the more common rule sets.

In over the board play, how would one practically manage splitting stones and handling partial stones?

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I should clarify that other than in the situations mentioned players can only play full stones. So actually splitting stones would only ever occur when a player times out in a game with more than two players. In two player Go it doesnā€™t happen. Only maybe if white runs out of full stones can the half stone be played.

In the VERY RARE case something other than the half stone of white is needed, paper tokens can be used to represent smaller fractions, but this only occurs in games with more than four players.

What does Lentear mean?

Len from Len as in the shape, Lentils, Biconvex lens, etc., Tear because groups have ā€˜eyesā€™

Weiqi/Baduk/Igo and especially ā€˜Goā€™ just arenā€™t optimal names at all for the proliferation of Go worldwide.

A person on L19 said Lentitears is the correct spelling, so Iā€™ll go with that!

Just to reiterate, this unique scoring system would only be necessary if there is a disagreement in Life&Death.

However you could argue that that method isnā€™t necessary at all, because since thereā€™s no passes you could solve life and disputes simply by playing on as in Area rules. So perhaps I should add that to the rules and leave the unique scoring method for beginners who are learning the game (but they give the same winner anyway). Also beginers are probably playing on a smaller board.

To sum up:

Territory scoring with territory in seki counted and points in dame shared pro-rata. No passes so life&death disputes solved by continuing to play. Repeated positions other than ko would result in one player running out of stones, black starts with 174 stones and seven black stones as prisoners, white starts with 179.5 stones and half a white stone as prisoner.

This is the essence of the ruleset, if we try it on OGS as an experimental ruleset clearly denoted as such it might become popular for practical reasons.

So this would be some kind of anti-go, a go variant where instead of trying to surround and separate your opponent and connect yourself, youā€™re trying to disconnect yourself and force your opponent to connect?

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Not really, itā€™s played exactly like normal go except when filling territory you already have you want to increase the amount of disconnected stones

I really donā€™t see how Lentitears would be more optimal than weiqi or badukā€¦

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Essentially, itā€™s ideal to have a name that isnā€™t biased towards either China, Korea or Japan!

I think the main issue with word ā€œgoā€ is that itā€™s too common a word in English and it already has many meanings. I donā€™t see any issue with the fact that itā€™s ā€œbiasedā€ by coming from a particular country.

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So you want to give it a name divorced entirely from its long tradition as one of the oldest board games in the world and give it some random name with a Latin etymology?

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Especially since the game was invented in Chinaā€¦

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