New variant invented by a kid today:
All your songs must be connected. You can have only one chain of stones on the board.
You can’t make eyes. If a player surrounds an eye, ie, a territory of one or more empty intersections without opponent stones inside, then that player immediately loses.
There is no pass. On your turn you must play.
How do the stones survive without eyes?
Is it still go with capturing rules? Do I lose if I capture my opponents only group because then I’ve made territory?
Visually what I mean is, and let’s look at a smaller board:
I’ve marked an example of the first 5 moves and then a series of “Ataris”. If black plays A1 does white A2 capture and lose, not capture but still lose, win, some other option?
If you can never capture black, and you can never cut off any points from being played by black, then it would seem like black will always have a move if white has.
If white plays A2 then white immediately has a giant eye in the north and loses the game.
Well black to play. Black plays A1, does white A2 capture and win?
Or is there not captures?
No, white cannot play A2 because it creates a giant eye and loses the game.
Not always true:
Here the players aren’t allowed to close their eyes, but they still have “territory” in the sense that no player can enter the other player’s territory without accidentally closing their own eye
It makes me wonder if a related variant, anti-capture go, would be interesting (the first player who captures a stone or a group of stones loses the game).
Is there a counter to this strategy: play in a corner and never surround empty space.
Well maybe not territory, in your diagram, as long as I fill all my side first then I should be able to creep in along the first line right? So even if I haven the smaller area it shouldn’t matter?
Unless I’m forced to play beside the last stone played like a snake. Then there’s some directionality to the movement of the group that’s forced.
Let’s make it even worse for white
Like I just fill in the white side first and then walk in along the first line and you can’t even block me off or capture me by the sounds of it
Looks like you solved the game! Is there any chance the game can be fixed with some extra rules? I was thinking maybe forbidding to bump into the side or into stones.
As for the kids, all their games ended with someone accidentally making an eye, and thus losing prematurely.
Are you using my board background?!
Thats awesome ^_______^
edit:
ah nevermind, that was a thumbnail link and not a screenshot xD
Actually it is the magic mirror that shows you the board you want to see.
Well one thing that came to mind while I was thinking about the name of the game and the rules was the mobile game snake.
The snake has a head and a tail, and you kind of have to keep moving in the direction you start with, and when you change it can only be the head that changes the direction.
In that sense if you made it like you have to place a stone adjacent to your last placed stone then there’s some funny odd/even effects that can happen which change which path you might fill in the board, or might not be able to fill at all.
Like if black follows the blue path vertically, they can run out of moves quicker than if they swap to the green path, or later to yellow say.
White also runs into some issues with their edge, probably to do with leaving a gap at D5.
I’m not sure it fixes the game, but it introduces slight complications.
I’ve seen some games try to ban an obviously good/unique first move, so one could try ban tengen as a first move if that was winning. Or similarly other games introduce a pie rule placing one stone of each color, or two stones etc, and then letting the other player pick which side they want to play.
Alternatively I’ve also seen some games like Abalone change the setup of the game from the original to a tournament setup to make the game less drawish.
So there’s different avenues to explore to try and balance a game that isn’t immediately solvable.
If you ban tengen as a first move, say black plays triangle here and white plays tengen
Black immediately has a direction choice to make, and because of the “new” snake rule white can choose the opposite direction, and black will be a bit slow to circle back to try and block.
As in like this
and this
You’d have to count the spaces and also find the longest paths you can make along edges and things.
It makes it at least a bit more difficult to understand what might happen, especially if there’s now some complications with the pathing around the edges.
Edit: continued
The obvious thing to check is white blocking black by following and copying but there’s some subtleties
Black 22 seems like a mistake because it creates an issue around the X’s.
While intentionally leaving a dame between black and white seems better for pathing (while before, previous position, it might’ve been a bad thing)
And I, off the top of my head, don’t know what the strategy is to win as white. It might be possible to figure out though.
But even these aren’t necessarily forced lines, they just kind of make sense from a maximising space sort of idea → don’t let yourself get boxed in and run into issues having no moves left.
