Edible Stones

Having recently given a birthday gift of edible stones (chocolate), I started pondering what interesting uses there could be for them.

Someone mentioned that they don't want to play a certain person, who usually keeps six or seven stones in his hand - the chocolates would melt. As such, this becomes a useful tool for teaching one of the good habits: don't take a stone from the bowl until your move is decided.

They also make an excellent reply to the joke that every passerby rediscovers: "Can you eat the stones?"

The most common idea is to eat the prisoners you have captured. Doing this of course means you should use area counting if you want to do the usual scoring.

Edible stones can be a nice motivation for beginners playing the capture game - every capture, you eat a stone, then you restart the game. The reason this makes more sense, is only in such a game is the number of captures at all relevant to who "wins".

All of these ideas of course rely on you trusting in the hygiene of your opponent, as you eat the pieces he has handled. Any ideas on how to avoid this? One would be to make this a betting game - you bet you can beat your opponent on a 9x9 with only 30 stones, so if you start with 40, you can eat 10. You cannot waste any moves once you think you've eaten too many.

Thinking about eating captured stones and scoring methods, the only complaint I have seen against the capture game, is that it causes players to be too capture-focused. Maybe the opposite game could help - where you do territory scoring, but you eat the prisoners - i.e. sacrificing stones will be more common. A problem with this - failed invasions will reduce the invaded opponent's score, unless you do count prisoners that remain on the board at the end of the game - of course then you would be trying your best to not actually capture anything - i.e. make your territory safe without actually removing opposing stones - just avoid that they can obtain two eyes.

Now this is of course over-analysing, the purpose is to have a nice snack while playing a nice game of Go. My last suggestion is to use it to train your counting ability - you can eat prisoners when you are in the lead, since you only need to win by 0.5, and you can also eat the stones you feel you will not need in order to win the game. (Be careful of ko fights then, which will be awkward in this case.) Of course if your main aim is to play a serious game, you can just eat stones in similar fashion to performing prisoner exchange. But then you don't get to eat more when you play well, so I don't like this idea as much as the counting exercise!

Another idea is that winner gets to eat all the remaining stones on the board.

unkx80: A prank I have seen in the past.

1. Slam a white "stone" onto the board.
2. Take that white "stone" up, and putting it into the mouth, literally eating it.

This literally gives the meaning of " eating stones" a whole new dimension.