At high school me and a friend used to play a kind of surrounding game by taking turns making points on a sheet of square-lined paper (from our maths books or whatever).
Did anyone else play something like that, or is there some go variant like that?
Our capture rule was that if you surround an area, then all the opponent points in that area are immediately captured - no concept of liberties and hence no “eyes” and no way to have a group be “alive”.
In terms of gameplay, we usually started in the middle of the sheet making a few moves, cross cutting and then it devolved into a huge fight of two dragons desperately trying to surround each other. Since any surrounded points were captured, then capturing was way easier - just get your surrounding points connected (diagonal connections count, even in a cross cut) faster than the opponent.
As a consequence, the fight was always super desperate -with my current perspective I’d say it felt like 9x9 feels, but on some 50x50 grid. Losing any meaningful stretch of your dragon was very bad because now your string of potential surrounding stones had a huge gap in them. Likewise if your points were cut in two (without a cross cut) you were in trouble. We always played wide nets around cutting mini groups until something somewhere collapsed in a spectacular way. I don’t think we had to count very often at the end of the game, but I think the rule was number of captured opponent points - not territory or area.
Also, we played with no special rules for the edges, you weren’t supposed to go near the edges I think.
Does any of that ring a bell? Would anyone be interested in trying it out?
Maybe the Go Variants team would find it interesting to implement ? ^^ 