Some musings on a "reverse" ko rule

[claire_yang]

@le_4TC

Many rules formulate capture like this:

1. Remove opponent strings without liberties
2. Remove own strings without liberties

If we switch the order of those two, we get a super different game, which still has the flavor of go. Territory is good, capturing things is good, etc. However, living is much much easier. One eye, even a false one, suffices. Thus this game is much less interesting. If aliens came up with this one first, I expect that after a while some of them would experiment with switching it up, and discover how much more interesting the other order of capture is.

The reconstruction of Ludus latrunculorum, has an even stranger liberty shortage rule, when a piece been clamped (has 2 liberties left), it will be immobile (since pieces can move in latrones), and after one turn of immobile and still been clamped, it will be dead.

It’s easy to imagine other rules of “atari” existed in the past been experimented upon. And some of the strange ones survived today. Ming mang (game) - Wikipedia, and this is just one of them.