Visualize go this way, instantly make it 30 times easier to count

Why has no one developped a go mod like this, either as a wooden board or online, yet? Instead of playing on intersections, place stones inside the squares. (Obv for a 19 x 19 board, you would need 19 x 19 squares.) Instantly, counting becomes 30 times easier for everyone involved. 100 Go Professionals Hate This Cheat. Seriously, nobody?!

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If OGS implements this mod, I will donate 20 bucks even though I’m poor.

“If aliens play go, they play inside the squares” - Maharani

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I don’t think it’s possible on OGS, but I found a site where you can play on the squares here!

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I have nothing against players who want to play between the lines, but I don’t think reading will be easier at all.
Maybe for players coming from chess or draughts?

I am bit afraid we lose more players as we get If we integrate your suggestion in OGS.

By the way, why 30, any reason (and not 25 or 100)?

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Where do you want to place the stones?
  • I want to place stones inside the squares.
  • I want to place stones on the intersections.

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I want to place stones on the best spot!

I can see how placing stones in the squares may aid score estimation but I’m against it because playing on the points means that the lines show what is connected to what.

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Unless of course the stones are so big that the lines are not really visible, which usually is the case :stuck_out_tongue: But why Go is played on the intersections and not squares is a good question though.

Suggested reason:
Most games play inside the boxes, but Go is so cool it doesn’t even play outside the boxes, but on the edge between inside and outside! Avant garde for sure

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Even Chinese chess is played on the intersections instead of inside a grid. From my digging into their past, I feel it is more likely based on cultural reasons and some relic from precursors that influenced them, Contain metaphors that no longer needed in their later forms.

The precursors related to them might not have been played on a grid board at all, but some free-formed or various designs of graphs, and the lines connected the spots are “roads” allowing movement passage, liked in merels

I had a post discussing my thoughts and diggings A hypothetical precursor game rules of ancient Go

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You guys playing on boards?

http://matthieu.walraet.net

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I don’t get it. How would playing in the squares instead of on the intersections make counting easier?

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Sorry, but feels like classical trolling to me. :crazy_face:

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Exactly this. My problem with counting is keeping the values in my head for long enough to come to an answer…

[But I suspect from the style of the post that this is a spoofy joke]

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Ah, OK. Silly me :dizzy_face:

I read a good tip for this that I found helped me: just count one group at a time, e.g. black, top-left, 10 points. Then play a move. Then on your next turn count another group, e.g. black, lower-right, 5 points. And so on. I find it is easier to remember how many points each group is worth, rather than a running total. Then you simply add them up once you’ve counted all groups.

This method also makes it easier to track changes in the score, e.g. if white has reduced black’s top-left by two points but all other groups are unchanged since the last count, then you know the result has only changed by two points and you don’t have to re-count the other groups.

Try it! Worked for me :slight_smile:

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For a lot of people realizing that this is 15 squares

image

is much easier than to realize that this is 15 intersections

image

I even have to count one by one to make sure in the second case lol. It’s kind of like brain works, it counts objects, not the lines that separate these objects. Hard to explain. For corners it’s even worse because edge intersection looks different.

image image

In games I find that I have to count in pairs those shapes that I would just recognize if they were squares and not intersections.

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Fair enough. I guess it’s just lucky for me that I don’t find the intersections any harder to count.

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Hmm, grew up playing games placing pieces on the intersections (not just go, Chinese chess as well), the “grid” is never a unit of count to my eyes, but “obstacles” and background that need to be filtered out.

And counting territory or estimation is not something have to learn early on playing Go, but local patterns that are strong or weak, or in good shapes. In that regard, the lines helps with the pattern finding to me, since it’s easier to line them up strait or in different shapes without zigzagging.

Most stones are not big enough to cover up the intersections completely, even if they are next to each other (they have to be, or it would be difficult to place them and pick them up), with plenty of room showing the line beneath. And my brain can just see the lines behind the stones (like seeing a line even if it is a dotted line)

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Here is a possible work around to partially do this. You can upload a custom board background image that has 19x19 squares aligned with the stones such that the stones are centered on the squares. If you play many games across varying board sizes, it will be kind of annoying to switch the image for each game, but it’s still doable.

However, the black grid lines are still overlaid and could be distracting. Maybe your background image could use a different color for the square boundaries to contrast. Or perhaps, there should be a customization option to change the color of the grid lines (or remove them altogether). EDIT: @AdamR showed that this can already be done below.

EDIT2: See below where I do this

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you cannot remove them completely, but matching the color of the board should be “good enough” (although some remains will be visible) for such a corner case scenario :slight_smile:

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Maybe a customizable transparency value could be added? That could also be an interesting feature for those that want partially transparent grid lines.

Probably would be quite easy too: GitHub - online-go/online-go.com: Source code for the Online-Go.com web interface

Personally I am not gonna do it though (at least not any time soon), sorry. Once I have the time to start contributing again, I have other projects on the radar :slight_smile: