Show HN: Voronoi Go(voronoigo.com) I posted once before but wanted to share again because a lot has changed. There's now a fairly strong bot to play against (contributed by a community member) and also correspondence games. The combination of these things helps a bit in finding people to play against. |
This is counter to the best strategy in normal go. We actually have a saying that “big dragons never die”, however it is actually an anti-proverb, because most dragons can be harassed while your opponent builds territory. So even if your dragons lives, you wasted a lot of stones keeping your dragon alive, while your opponent was calmly building territory, and gaining points.
One issue is that I think I made the small board too small. This makes it very easy for a monolithic group to dominate. The bot prefers to open right in the center, and I've generally found that to be strong.
I _think_ that playing on the big board gives some more variety to the strategy, but I haven't finished enough games yet to be sure. Playing really connected though seems to still be hard to beat. If players continue to get stronger and play big board games it will be interesting to see how the meta evolves.
Two suggestions:
- Rename the game to just "Voronoi". There is enough in here that it feels like more than just an incremental update to Go!
- Highlight the latest piece that moved like on OGS, otherwise it is easy to lose track.
For the naming, I would think the game needs a bigger following before I can drop the "Go" or otherwise shorten the name. Not sure the SEO situation would be very good with just "Voronoi" right now :)
I only played a little, but it is clear that this game strongly prefers tight extending connections. In go terms “territory.” I am not clear if ‘influence’ is as useful a concept here; it seems very strong to make tight connections.
One of the many things that make go great is that a range of moves in relation to other stones provide a set of trade offs - more certain connection but less total influence / future territory ‘claimed’ - I’m not clear your variant has this. If so, it would be really useful to explore these move sets and give the player some basic tutorials about them. If it doesn’t, then I humbly suggest you change the rules so that it does. Perhaps tight groups can extend their ‘non placement’ range a little more, or extend their distance at which they connect up to a lone stone?
Last note, any beginner go tutorial explains that it costs more stones to live in the middle than it does the side, and that costs more than the corner. I’d be super interested to see some minimal living group definitions in the tutorial.
Again, thanks! this is really cool.
The bigger board sizes definitely feel different to me, but I haven't played enough games yet to really know for sure. I'm interested in watching the meta develop. Maybe it will turn out that there really is a dominant strategy and the game is not as deep as Go, but I don't think I've seen enough to start thinking that yet.
The discord is pretty active and people discuss strategy a lot if you're interested. Regardless, thanks for playing! https://discord.gg/4ren7UAFeb
Honestly, as a long time Voronoi enthusiast, the idea of turning a regular grid into a Voronoi diagram is kind of obvious and I admit that this is definitely something that I would like to have come up with myself, but the idea never occurred to me.
The implementation is obviously pretty complex though. And I remember trying to get into regular Go several times along the years and I've always found it very difficult to grasp it (the computer thoroughly beat me every single time!) and I lost the motivation.
I read your tutorial pages, but I learn best by doing so I guess only playing for some significant amount of time will actually help me have a more than skin deep understanding of the game.
I do wish there was a Windows desktop version as the web version is eating 90% of my laptop's CPU when playing against the bot.
The only alternative version of Go I’ve played before was magnetic Go, where all the rules are the same except that, along the axis lines where you place a piece, like colours attract and opposite colours repel.
On Voronoi, I did feel like the continuous space made it really hard to judge whether there was enough room, whether the opponent could get in, etc. Maybe it would work better if it were discretized a bit? Or maybe I just need to play it more.
Hope that helps!
I don't know Go well enough to even begin to conceptualize how deeply this changes the rules and interactions of the game, so I'm not going to be able to comment on the concept itself, but I bounced off the tutorial the first time and by the end of it had no desire to play a full game against a bot.
Maybe if the tutorial had walked me through the beginning and middle of the match with the bot and engineered the match so that the tutorial scenarios appeared within that game, it would have felt like less of a committment to actually start a full game.
My takeaway from the past couple months is that the game is just kind of hard to learn. I actually felt the same way about trying to learn traditional Go - it was very daunting to start a game. Basically all of the players who have stuck around / joined the discord were already pretty familiar with Go, so I think it helped bridge that gap a bit. I've spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to make the game more approachable, but it kind of seems like the core audience for now might just be people who already like Go. There also seems to be a lot of overlap with people who are interested in designing a bot to play, so I've open sourced some code to allow for that: https://github.com/csun/voronoi-go-rs
Anyway, thanks for taking a look!
I'd say general overall strategy is to try to create "bubbles". You want to surround areas with your stones rather than filling them in.
On the small board, it's pretty hard to go wrong with just making a line of solidly connected stones (make sure the colored line shows up between them) between two edges of the board. This might not let you win against the bot, but will at least help you claim territory. Then once you have figured out how to do that, you can start to think about making moves that block the bot from surrounding area, or reduce the amount of area available to it, etc.
One of the guys on the discord is a strong traditional Go player and was playing a lot of teaching games with people yesterday. If you're interested in learning you could ping on the discord and I'm sure he or someone else would be down to help you out: https://discord.gg/4ren7UAFeb