Still no rengo?

Great idea! We’ve actually been playing Team Go in an ad hoc fashion via a forum thread, private forum messages, and private demo boards:

This exercise has illustrated that it would certainly be nice if there were some supporting features to make this easier (even if full team go support could not implemented):

  1. Ability to spectate other public games, e.g., by adding to your home screen and subscribing to email notifications for turn changes.
  2. Somehow pinning a demo board to your home screen. We’re using demo boards for discussion.
  3. Sharing Malkovic logs of an ongoing game with other players.

Of course, integrated Rengo/Team Go support would be even better, but these features might be easier/more feasible and still be very helpful for people playing Rengo/Team Go in ad hoc manner in the meantime.

I guess another different between classic Rengo vs how we’re playing Team Go is that discussion is not allowed in Rengo, while it is in Team Go.

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The recent pros vs supporter + ai game could’ve been on OGS :slight_smile:

I’m wondering for pair go an team go:

  • It’s usual that the players on the same team don’t communicate in pair go right? Would it be expected that in team go the players would or wouldn’t communicate - maybe that can just be a setting? A shared demo board would be cool or some way of pinning it as yebellz said.

  • If it’s the case where you don’t communicate moves, should it show who’s to play next to all players or just say Team A/Team B? There’s the idea of a Pair Go tesuji, where you play a ko threat to avoid the stronger player making a move, or similarly to give the stronger player the choice or the next big move. This would be be easier to do I’d say if you could see whose turn was next. (It would be nice if spectators could see whos turn it was though for live games)

  • Would there be an extra rating for this team/rengo to play it ranked or would it somehow merge into the current ratings like with 9x9, 13x13 etc.

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But these could just be game settings for either variant “allow discussion” or “do not allow discussion”; “any team member can make a move” or “players alternate moving”

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Does this fit here?

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I’ve set a visualping.io alert for the games, but it would be a massive improvement to be able to “follow” a game and get notifications on a move same as for your games.

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That’s easy enough: If players have no preference, the two strongest would be on opposite teams. In correspondence, the last THREE moves should probably be displayed.

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That is a substantial feature indeed. I am very curious about Rengo too but never had the chance to play it

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I have played rengo by three methods.

  1. on KGS
  2. on IGS (“Pandanet”)
  3. by the OSR rengo accounts on OGS

The third option is a “botch” – the team logs into the same account and relies on gentlemen’s rules to distinguish the turn order. KGS and IGS have real rengo functionality.

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I’ve only played it IRL

I’ve played it on a demo board here on OGS, just using the chat.

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As I’ve strayed into this topic, let me also say that I really love “zen Go”, a variant available on VGS.

In zen Go, there are 3 players but only 2 colours, and all players play as both colours in a rotating order.

I played a game of zen Go for something like five hours late last year.

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Yeah I love this. Especially when I just came up with a move that makes life really hard for the opponent.

I feel really great about this.

I lean back, smiling.

And slowly it dawns on me, that it’s me who’s in trouble now.

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There are times when I couldn’t stop laughing in a real life game, and that was rengo time.

Rengo is not only great for teaching.

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I’d love to see rengo (and other variants, such as n-color go); please continue to try and work this into the dev priorities if possible.

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Not having Rengo and other trivial Go variants is probably the most disappointing aspect of OGS. I just can’t understand how the guys developing this server made such a nice work with AI analysis but can’t go ahead with even an extremely simple Go variant, like Rengo or One Color Go.

At this point, I wonder, how much money or other type of incentive would it take for the devs to get motivated?

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Rengo is conceptually simple. But when everything on the backend is written for a game between two players, it gets harder. I think @anoek once estimated that coding rengo would take about 100 hours, plus bug fixing. That number has probably increased as new features have been added. That’s not to say rengo won’t happen; it’s only to show the scope of the request.

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:wink:

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But when everything on the backend is written for a game between two players, it gets harder.

I agree completely. And I actually think this problem is more general than Rengo. I believe that, given the size of OGS at this moment, anything that slightly diverges from its main features will take a very big — absolute but not relative — amount of time to implement, even though they might be trivial to implement in a project from scratch. I guess this is just the nature of handling a project that became big.

But, on the other hand, I think it’s one of the features that would make the most difference for its user base… And I think that implementing Rengo would ease the path towards implementing other Go variants too, so these 100 hours might reduce other implementations to, say, 20 hours — I know… of course the devs know about this type of stuff…

And how about starting with One Color Go, which is just cosmetic, to see if the impact is worth the shot on other more complicated variants?

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I care much more on rengo as other variants.

Nah for me, OGS has still to have a better welcome to beginners. That would be my priority (before rengo)

What about a bicolor?

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I think OGS is quite friendly to new people, Rengo should be priority. It’s such a important Go Variation and that much common, it’s a shame not having it. Also Rengo is super, to train your Go skills. You can combine different styles of playing and also different levels of knowledge.
It is a good lecture for the weaker player, to see the good moves from the better one and it’s also a lecture for the better player, who got to think, which plans can my partner understand.

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