Comment by ianthehenry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianthehenry | Hacker News Reader

I really like the idea of this. Some thoughts:

1. It's difficult for me to tell which spaces are open for play and which aren't -- the border is hard to parse. (Is that this cell's border, or the adjacent cell?) This isn't really an issue during placement, but it is an issue for signalling that a cell has been "captured," which is hard for me to tell.

2. Hexagon grid is absolutely the right call. :)

3. The influence mechanic is very opaque: it's very hard for me to predict what will happen next, which makes me feel like I'm playing a little "intuitively," instead of planning out my moves with intention. Some way to see "this is the current state and this will be the next state" would help with that, but I think as long as influence is a continuous quantity it's going to be difficult to visualize and predict.

4. Making the board itself hexagonal (ala Hexxagon) will give you an odd number of cells, preventing ties. Might also be nice to smooth out cell-strength discontinuities around the top and bottom edges.

5. Balancing the first-player advantage by making the first move a "weak stone" was very confusing to me, because an adjacent move by player two will "capture" my initial stone with a single stone of theirs. I didn't understand this until I saw your comment about it here. I think the pie rule would work well in this game, but it's hard for me to reason about since edge moves are offensively weaker but defensively stronger... I'm not sure how well it would shake out, if you haven't tried it already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_rule

Thanks for the feedback :) I appreciate it!

1. I can try experimenting with the border thickness. Selectable tiles would have a light gray border, instead of the dark green/blue border.

3. I'm planning to add a way to view the 'next state' in the next version of the game. But still trying to figure out a good way to visualize the 'influence' of each tile, besides the color.

4. Yes, also will try out the hexagonal board shape. And give players more options for the board size too. I think it's the right size for smaller screens like a mobile phone, but desktop users might want to play with more tiles.

5. Thanks for suggesting the pie rule. I looked into it, but think it'll be too confusing, especially for 1st time players. The 'weak stone' would be easier to understand for new players - perhaps except for those with a Go background :)

It never occurred to me that the first stone might be a weaker stone. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out why the computer could play next to my first stone, and if I played next to the computer, the computer could then take my first stone. It was very counter intuitive and frustrating, like the computer had an advantage somehow.

I agree, I actually got the impression that the computer in hard mode had an advantage unfairly beyond just the first move.

A mode where tile colors are displayed as numbers would help with understanding the rules.

Agree with other commentors that the 'weak stone' is difficult to understand for new players

Just indicate which stones will become capturable next turn.

> I looked into it, but think it'll be too confusing, especially for 1st time players.

I think the current weak stone is already very confusing, judging by my experience and some other comments, but I have not done any real playtesting.

But I would argue that first time players shouldn't play with the pie rule: they should just get the first-player advantage. It's a nice way to handicap the AI while the player learns the rules -- by the time someone knows the game well enough to play the balanced version, they have to learn a new rule. Just like new Go players start with extra stones on the board -- the game is the most fun when the two players are equally balanced, not necessarily on equal footing.

I think there's an implementation that makes it pretty intuitive: the first stone played doesn't get a border (or a more clear visual indicator that it's not capturable :). So the second player can choose to capture it, or to play elsewhere. If they play elsewhere, the first stone then becomes "locked." I think that's clearer than like switching colors or something.

The strategy for first-move play seems easier to grok than the strategy for a 55% weak stone, but I have to caveat that with: I play Hex, so it's familiar to me.

I've updated the UI of the game, so that it's more obvious that the 1st stone is weaker than the subsequent ones. Hopefully that will help with some of the confusion.

I agree that a 55% weak stone is not ideal, but it seems to be the easiest way to balance the game for now. Having the 1st stone become "locked" if it doesn't get captured, would also be surprising for new players.

I also did think about just letting players enjoy the 1st-player advantage, but on hard AI, green wins 43-7. That was what made me think of a way to balance the game in the 1st place.

As a counterpoint to 3, learning how influence works by playing is much more fun than analyzing well defined rules in the abstract :)

People playing go for over 4000 years might disagree.

The rules are extremely simple and well defined, and yet the result is a very abstract game.

Interestingly, there is a concept called influence in go. And it is fun to learn what influence is, and how to use it. You could spend years and still have much to learn about influence in go, but it's not mentioned anywhere in the rules.

Slightly related, here's a site where one can learn playing go with assisted visuals regarding influence: https://colorgoserver.com/en

Very interesting. This is pretty much the opposite of the idea I've had for making Go more beginner-friendly.

I think some beginners could benefit from see the more complex nature of Go, by letting them focus on large scale matters, and ignore the tactics of battle. The way to do this would be to let the player choose which general region of the board they want to play in, but have their stone snap to the locally best intersection as their cursor moves across the board. (The snapping, I suppose, could vary in distance depending on how much stronger the strongest move is. A very strong/important move could snap from across a quarter of the board, but if it's a less important move they'd effectively have to hover on one of its neighbours for it to be suggested.)

So effectively the player would get unassisted practise at spotting which groups of stones are weak, and where influence needs to be strengthened, but simultaneously have AI assist in dealing with local battles and making life.

I suspect this would make Go play more like a traditional RTS video game: at lower levels, the player bosses over more general goals, and individual units make local decisions on when to shoot and how to move places through a primitive AI. At higher levels, the human player takes over more of the local decision making in improving their "micro".

That sounds like an exciting idea!

Though, personally I'm not sure how far one could get and staying true to the spirit, or the deliciousness of go, namely the interweaving quality of different ever-status-changing groups and also considering that stones have somewhat global effects (ladder). Perhaps the AI could also make helpful annotations to player why the move was important. Or suggest that this and that group should be strengthened. Or if player makes a move that first selects a region, then give some options to choose from.

I love abstract aspects of go (e.g. reading attack and defence, direction of play) but often situations involve local context that are too interesting to ignore, and thus tesujis. It would definitely would be fun to see how a game like you are suggesting would feel like.

One thing I really liked about go is that learning from a book, or trying out puzzles, is much easier than for example in Chess due to much less destructive change in the board.

(I'm ranked online perhaps 3-5 kyu, so take my take with a grain of salt).

Wrt. teaching absolute beginners, here's a nice but not that experimentally-minded blog post by a European player that became professional in Japan: https://www.nordicgodojo.eu/post/9/how-should-we-teach-go-to...

I like the idea you linked to, too. In fact, the first version of that "have more stones on the board" is exactly how I explain the rules of the game to beginners. They pretty quickly realise the tediousness of filling in what's effectively already owned intersections, at which point they're ready to hear that "normally, experienced players don't actually go through the trouble of filling it in, they just count it as theirs. If there is any dispute about whose it is, play resumes until it becomes clear again."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com