Reuse Go

A Go variant.

Players can either put a stone on the board or reuse a stone already on the board. Territory is counted, prisoners not. This gives rise to some changes in life and death issues, and also to the removal of superfluous stones.

I saw this being played in Moscow. --DieterVerhofstadt

BillSpight: Interesting, Dieter! ;-)

I think that Chinese scoring or Korean scoring might be better, because otherwise you can get a long endgame where each player takes stones from his territory and places them in the opponent's territory.

Also, a SuperKo rule seems advisable, because the possibilities for whole board repetition seem to increase dramatically.

I can be wrong, but I think JapaneseScoring is in fact better, because one of the goals of this variant is precisely to develop your feeling for which stones are or have become superfluous. You are prophetic in the sense that the games that I watched had long endgames. It made sense though.

I guess the variant also teaches you about KoriGatachi.

--Dieter

This is similar to a game I played a few times with a friend of mine that we called Slide Go. Instead of placing a new stone, you could opt to slide one of your stones along the board. You could slide horizontally or diagonally, and go as far as you like until another stone (friendly or enemy) blocks your path. Its worth a shot, and it is best to toy around with some modifying rules (eg. you cant slide into a connection with friendly stones, you cant kill a stone with a slide, you can't slide out of atari, etc.) until you find a system that you enjoy.

"You can't slide out of atari" - reminds me of the scene in HikaruNoGo with Hikaru giving a first lesson to Akari... :) -- KarlKnechtel

I'm afraid I don't really understand how can a stone be "reused"... Reuven

I think they mean pick up one of your other stones on the board and replace it somewhere else. Hmm...a dango now becomes shinogi? - Mef

Hard to imagine such a game where one can take a stone from a dead group in such a way that the opponent'll have to respond to keep it dead and threatn to kill another group... Many other weird situations come to mind... Reuven