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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 rectangular 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 or superko, respectively, hence 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.


rubilia: The roundgo map looks really good. (Beautiful shape!)

Another goban I like is the 19x19 completely borderless one, wich can be created by defining the two end points of each row (resp. each column) to be adjacent. Everything there appears as if in an infinite 2dim square crystal structure with period of 19 points, and the actual board beeing just an arbitrary 19x19 section of the grid. (You could shift this 19x19 board focus by any step, but, although the game probably will look different, it will be the same.)

Well, it's hard to get settled in the beginning, because there're no corners at all, every point is a "middle-of-the-board" point.

PurpleHaze: This is what is known as an anchor-ring (a torus where the major and minor axes are equal). We were playing go on them 20 years ago. Chess players have been playing on them for over a hundred years (see Dawson's Five Classics of Fairy Chess).

rubilia: That's true, more than just a few games have been played using a "simple" toroidal goban, even by non-scientists. (Unlike the more complicated tori, wich go players don't seem to be fond of.) Two of my friends had enjoyed borderless go already before I asked them if they knew it. However, there's almost nothing written to be found about it, neither in Sensei's nor in Real Libraries or elsewhere in the net. Could anyone recommend us any arguable literature? I suppose particularly the openings must be very different!

PurpleHaze: One amusing thing about an anchor-rings is that every ladder breaks itself. Other tori can be even more amusing: choose the appropriate major/minor axes and every stone breaks every ladder.


The round go provided by the link above is of similar nature:

It is equivalent to a half-borderless, half-borderlined diagonal (4+5)x9 board:

Just imagine this ...

[Diagram]
roundgo equivalent (81 points)


... with the stubs at the long edges bent and connected to form a continous line at both sides (that's the "borderlines", wich correspond to the outer and the inner circle of roundgo), while the short edges are simply joined by the stubs so that it's "border" points become adjacent (that's the "borderless" border). If the long edges were joined, too, the game would become a rectangular 9x9 borderless one. (duh ... hard to explain in english, improvements/corrections highly appreciated!)

Btw, this diagram is exactly what you get by matching together side by side the two disparate parts of Sebastian's diagonal board analysis, given below. --rubilia


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


http://users.pandora.be/dual/go/partial.png A generalisation of the Milton Keynes variant is to partially sever connections. So three types of connections can exist between two neighbouring points 'A' and 'B': the full (classical) connection, a half connection extending from A or no connection. The interesting case is the half connection: it provides a liberty for point 'A' from which it departs, but not for its neighbouring point 'B', where it does not arrive. So, playing on 'B' takes away a liberty from 'A', but 'A' never influences 'B'. This introduces a concept of "rough (or high) terrain" in the game. Jurgen Ott's GoWin screensaver "barrier" setting parially reflects this idea by completely cutting out some intersections. The standard Goishi size will give a big practical problem: partial connections are almost impossible to see below the stones. --axd


Other ideas

Rotated board

A non-square goban can be made by turning a normal board 45 degrees, and using the new definitions of horizontal and vertical to define liberties. That is:

[Diagram]
diagonal liberties

In this diagram, the black stone has just been captured. The marked white stone has four free liberties, each marked with a square.



This goban has a few unusual features:

  • Each corner has only one liberty.
  • Every intersection on the edge has only two liberties.
  • The edges are not directly connected.
  • No intersection has exactly three liberties.
  • Playing on this board is like playing two, simultaneous games. If two pieces would be next to each other on a normal goban, on a diagonal goban, they do not interact.

(Sebastian:) So what's the point? Why make the game artificially confusing?

ChipUni: It's an unusual goban that requires nothing more than what go players already have.

(Sebastian:) Well, yes, all unusual boards add some form of a challenge. But let me explain what I mean: Your change can be separated in a functional and a graphical component.

Functionally, your goban is equivalent to this:

[Diagram]

[123]
The graphical change is tantamount to (a) rotating them, (b) enmeshing them and (c) changing the lines so that they connect stones from different half-boards rather than adjacent stones. While this change does create an inconveniency which you may regard as a challenge, it certainly does not introduce any new way of playing, tactics or strategy.

As to the functional change, it actually takes away from the desirable complexity of go. Splitting the board into two disparate half-boards only destroys many interesting strategic connections. If you are willing to play for a certain amount of time in one chunk, why not just play on one board that's twice as big?


"Surface? " what surface ? Has anyone in here thought about 3-Dimensionnal Go ? a nice match on 9x9x9? gobans whith all the usual rules ?



This is a copy of the living page "Unusual Gobans" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.