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Play Go - On A Mobius Strip?
Lewey Geselowitz writes "Freed Go is a new freely downloadable game for Windows and Mac OS X that extends the 'game of Go' on any arbitrary 3d graph. These include Mobius strips, spheres, tori, cubes and so forth, and even a few flat boards but with 3, 5 or 6 neighbored nodes. To anyone who has played the game, or is interested in this great game, I assure you that you will find this site interesting and it will help you expand your understanding of the game." There's also Freed Invasion - looks like these are both from the author of the similarly unconventional Quake II stereogram implementation, as previously mentioned on Slashdot Games.
As in, I have my own board, stones, etc. I have played numerous games, but am horribly amateur. This is besides the point though, I've read a lot about Go, it's history, etc. And I find myself confused - what's the point of slapping a graph on a 3 dimensional object and calling it a Go Board?
Because I'll clue you in, just because it has the rules of Go, doesn't mean it is Go. This is the result of boredom and a little too much use of artistic license.
You're not playing Go on a mobius strip, you're playing something else on a Mobius strip with the same rules. Feh.
I know about a billion Chinese people who would mod this as +5, insightful, but I have a feeling I'm going to get -1, flamebait. Enjoy.
schild
editor, f13.net
In 'legal' terms, I wouldn't call it Go. Go is a game played on a two-dimensional board.
In spiritual terms, I would. Go, as I see it, encourages thought, strategy, willingness to sacrifice, looking at the big picture, thinking ahead, getting your priorities right, etc. I used to be utter rubbish at Go: I though that since two eyes were immortal, if I got two eyes, I'd have a huge advantage over somebody without them. Needless to say, I lost every game while playing like that. I'm still probably rubbish, but at least it's uselessness as opposed to stupidity. </digression>
As I said, Go is a game about strategy. If you play on a diffeent board, you still need strategy, perhaps moreso. If it follows the rules of Go (excluding those relating to board layout) and encourages thought, it's Go. If it doesn't follow the rules or doesn't bring forth your inner deviousness, it isn't.
This is an interesting idea, and actually quite worthwhile and might provide a seasoned player with new insight into the game.
I have played chess from the time I was a small child. I initially took interest in Go after seeing Pi (Aronofski's cyberpunk-influenced film about a mathematician trying to predict the stock market). It's a wonderful game, and I think its simplicity and beauty far succeeds that of chess.
The beautiful thing about Go is that the rules are extremely simple:
Black starts first. Turns alternate. In each turn, you are allowed to place a piece of your colour on an empty position. If a group of the enemy pieces are surrounded by your pieces (i.e. your pieces occupy all immediately adjacent free points around the enemy group), then you have captured the enemy group, and remove those pieces.
The only other rule is a small exception for the placement of certain pieces to avoid repeated board states.
But that's the entire game rules. The rules themselves don't even give you a _hint_ as to how to play the game effectively. Go strategy revolves around much higher level constructs that are a result of these few basic rules.
Given the simplicity of the rules, it's easy to generalize Go based on graphs. The typical 19x19 board can be thought of as a graph, with each internal position being represented by a node of degree four, each side position being represented by a node of degree three, and the four corner positions being nodes of degree two. Groups of pieces can be formalized as sets of connected subgraphs in which all nodes have the same colour. And 'capture' defined as a colouring of an uncoloured node, such that the state of the graph changes where a connected subgraph of opposite-colored nodes which used to have at least one adjacent uncoloured node, now has no adjacent uncoloured nodes.
Go is one of the few games where the rules are so basic, that it probably works without hitches even when you change something as fundamental as the "board" layout.
Anyway, for those of you who do not know Go.. I would strongly suggest trying it. You _WILL_ suck at first. You will suck _hard_. But keep playing, and you'll notice that you start seeing patterns.. that for certain configurations of portions of the board, you feel "good" or "bad" about it.. that you instinctively seek to establish certain kinds of configurations on the board. It's really amazing the way the game changes your brain in ways that you don't even fully understand.
Go is the ultimate board game. Do yourself a favour and check it out. It's worth it. Screw artificial computer strategy games where the complexity of the game is a side-effect of the complexity of the rules.. and the games aren't even that complex in the end. Forget Master of Orion, or Civilization, or any number of other turn-based strategy games. Try a strategy game where the complexity is intrinsic to the game itself.. and is limited only by the ability of your mind.
-Laxitive