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Unusual Gobans
    Keywords: Equipment, Software

Go can be played on virtually any surface, provided it's flat enough. It has been played on maps of the world, among other things. For all these games, the normal rules apply.

Non-square gobans

The simplest of these is a rectangular goban, see 13x9 for an example game.

Gobans smaller than 2x3 typically lead to a game which ends with repetitive captures, and the game end becomes highly dependent on the ruleset used.

Irregular gobans

Other possibilities lie in the creation of gobans which are irregular.

The simplest one of these is basically a normal goban, with a hole in the middle, but of course you can make a goban in any shape you wish, and the lines connecting the intersections need not necessarily be straight, equal length or even at straight angles to each other. However, gobans like these are normally made more for fun than to play serious games on.

For a game on a goban with no tengen, see Virtueless.


If you are wondering how to create an irregular go board within these pages, see Creating Irregular Gobans With Wiki.


From a post to RGG by Matthew MACFADYEN:

[...] A good one was a map of Switzerland, constructed in 1984 by Patrice GOSTELI. Here there were 361 intersections with numbers of liberties varying from 1 to about 15. Features included:

Zurich
poorly connected to the rest of the board but with two adjacent points having only it as liberties, so a play there (banker) had two eyes instantly.
Porrentruy
the venue for that year's European Championship, had about 15 liberties many of which were on the edge.
The mountains
an area where most points had 2 or 3 liberties. very hard to make eyes, full of surprising liberty shortage problems. It was possible to surround the whole mountain area with a surprisingly small number of stones.
The plains
a flat area where most points had 6 liberties, normally ended up as dame.
Liechtenstein
four intersections not connected to the rest of the board - a 4 point endgame play.

Other possibilities lie in playing on regular boards where the points are not connected as squares. Hexagonal connections (chinese checkers layout) can be played on, as can of course any combination of triangles, squares, pentagons, etc. etc.


[ext] This one looks cool, too. It's hard to describe, but every intersection has 4 liberties (even the edges). On it a sensei lost to a 2 kyu. --SifuEric

There is a small Java program called "RoundGo?" available to play this variant over internet (no AI included). It can be downloaded [ext] here. --LordOfPi

I think of it as being a 'squashed' cylinder (hence I put it at 3DOn2DGoban - you can imagine it being stretched around the outside (or inside :-) of a cylinder - the number of intersections for each 'ring' is the same... --MortenPahle.


The oddest go layout I have heard of was a 3-dimensional diamond crystal lattice. You can see a picture of a very small part of the structure at [ext] http://cst-www.nrl.navy.mil/lattice/struk/a4.html Each point is connected to four others at the vertices of a regular tetrahedron. Ladders are helical, and there are very strange edge effects. This 'board' was written up in an English-language Go magazine in the 1960s. --Ed Cherlin


Another interesting idea I have toyed with is the concept of playing go on Celtic Knots. You could play anywhere that two lines intersected, and a point's liberties would be the next 4 intersections reached by following the knot out in all 4 directions from that point. The result would be that some points would have liberties quite far away. If you allow play on corners (which occur differently in celtic knots than in grids) then all points would have 4 liberties, except the corners themselves which would have 2. Alternatively, if you do not allow play on corners, then some points would have 3 and 2 liberties. The way in which celtic knots are constructed would allow you to create boards in any shape, with interesting factors, such as permanent walls partway down the middle, or entire sections of the board connected to the rest by only one point. Because of the amazing diversity of celtic knots, and how easy it is to construct them, it would allow lots of variety. Take a look at [ext] http://www.wallace.net/knots/samples/ and see what I mean.


[ext] Milton Keynes Go

... is another example of a goban based on a map, in this case a map of the English town of Milton Keynes. It is approximately a square grid, but with rather irregular edges and a few points with only three liberties in the middle of the board. Unfortunately, I don't think that the diagramming facilities of Senseis Library are good enough for me to give you a picture! you'll just have to follow the link above.

--TimHunt


[ext] Jenn

For those who think 2D go is too easy, Jenn is a program by Fritz Obermeyer which lets you play on all kinds of bizarre projective geometries.

--SiouxDenim


A generalisation of the Milton Keynes variant is to partially sever connections: points then lose a liberty in some directions, but can still influence in the direction where connections still are running. This introduces "rough terrain" (see example: [ext] http://users.pandora.be/dual/example.jpg) in the game.

To introduce the concept of "fog of war", another variant requires a server delaying moves and information: when a stone is placed, it generates a diamond-like "ripple" that extends n points (typically 1; 0=infinite speed, i.e. normal Go behaviour) per move in all 4 directions with each move: when such a ripple crosses an opponent group, then only is the opponent shown that stone and becomes (partially) visible if that opponent group was not visible yet. The ripple can initially be delayed for m moves (typically 0) before it starts to spread. Playing on a position that is occupied is forbidden, but the resident stone will be visible and the opponent will be informed of the tentative. So in general, the sparser the goban, the more difficult it will be to get a complete picture.

--alexander duytschaever [ext] (axd)



This is a copy of the living page "Unusual Gobans" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.