We play this while waiting for tournament rounds to finish in Brisbane, sometimes. Also to mess with the strong players' heads.

• The weakest player gets black, the strongest player gets white, the other player gets blue.
• The player who fills in the last liberty of a group captures the group.
• Ko, seki, and suicide rules apply as normal (Australia uses Japanese rules for tournament play).
• The games ends after three passes in a row.
• Scoring is quasi-Japanese: one point for each captured stone plus one point per enclosed intersection of territory plus komi.
• Handicap stones...no. Just...no.

In principle this can be extended to N players; there has been one four-colour game in Brisbane to my knowledge (black, purple, blue, white), and all of the participants are still nominally sane.

Extension to three-colour zen go and three-colour pair go is left as an exercise for the reader.

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/multigo.html

In practice, multi-player go is a negotiation game.

Have you played much of it Robert? In my experience, it generally ends up with very little co-operation between players ..

What I played usually ends up as "gang up on the leader", so I agree with Robert on the negotiation part.
I think I've seen some rules that integrated making and breaking alliances and shared wins in order to regulate that part of the game.

Edit: found them. http://homepages.di.fc.ul.pt/~jpn/gv/players.htm

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Thanks for this, nice link. I agree also, it ends up with ganging up on the leader, but I wouldn't have described that as negotiation

I suppose it is closer to co-operation though, so I think I chose a poor word, but I haven't encountered many "alliances" without rules to enable shared victories.

I certainly think area scoring works better with multi-player go as well.

It seems that by using Japanese scoring that there would be races to capture dead stones which wouldn't get captured in regular Go. In normal go, you'd never waste moves to capture dead stones unless necessary. In some cases it would even create a new kind of three-color seki.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
$$ --------------
$$| S S . X . X .
$$| S S X X X X .
$$| . O X . X . .
$$| O O O X X . .
$$| . O . O . . .
$$| O O O O . . .
$$| . . . . . . .[/go]

Neither black nor white can atari the four red stones in the corner, because it would allow the other to capture them and get the four points for prisoners. So would the red stones be alive? Also, red could play in one of the liberties to give the free points to the player to his left as a trade for some helpful play elsewhere on the board... Is table-talk permitted?

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
$$ --------------
$$| . S X . X . .
$$| S S X X X . .
$$| . O X . X . .
$$| O O O X X . .
$$| . O . O . . .
$$| O O O O . . .
$$| . . . . . . .[/go]

And what about this? Black has no shared liberties with the stones in question and doesn't even have a legal move to atari them. But white still can't capture them.

And if suicide were permitted, could you self-capture your own dead stones for points? If area scoring were used, the stones would be just dead as normal. Maybe prisoners should count as negative points for the captured player instead of points for the capturing player. That would make area and territory scoring consistent.

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KGS 4 kyu - Game Archive - Keyboard Otaku

Good post fwiffo. You are highlighting some of the reasons I much prefer area scoring for greater than 2 person Go

I've played one or two games of multi-colored go. And that was enough to know that I never, ever, wanted to play it again. I found it to be a painfully annoying game, where any plan a player has that might succeed is easily thwarted when the other players gang up, and your only hope of scoring significant points is for the other players to play chicken with each other, hoping somebody *else* will waste a move on ruining your plans. Yuck.

The closest thing to multi-colored go that is an enjoyable game IMHO is Through the Desert. It has no capturing, but scoring territory is important, and it uses a clever way of limiting where people can play that makes it harder for everybody to gang up on the perceived leader.

In Australia, the Melbourne players believe it doesn't, and the Brisbane players believe it does. We call it moral seki.

Prisoners always count as minus for their colour.

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

3 color go is impossible to play.
how about changing the board and grid shape into pentagon, hexagon, octagon etc?
that might be intresting..just a thought.

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"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson

I like this idea ... but that could be a lot of liberties on a single stone.

Hmmm, I need to think about this a bit more ...

You need not increase liberties. Changing the shape of the "squares" and changing the number of liberties (edges) at each point may be done independently.

For example, see the first two big pictures on this site (which I randomly pulled off google): http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/poincare/poincare.html

The first has pentagonal regions but still only four liberties per stone. The second keeps square regions but has five liberties per stone. (The boundary of the board would necessarily be wonky though.)

I was thinking simpler (and therefore more liberties). It's an interesting idea either way.

A regular hexogonal grid would only have three liberties per stone.

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KGS 4 kyu - Game Archive - Keyboard Otaku

Ah yes ... my visualization skills are lacking, it seems.

Thanks for the image.

The key question here (for different numbers of liberties and differently shaped regions) is how to play such a game on the forum!

I guess the euclidean ones, like the hexagonal one Fwiffo posted, or the "dual" one with triangular regions and 6 liberties per stone, would be easiest.

For example:

--..--..--..--..--
..--..--..--..--..
--..--..--..--..--
..--..--..--..--..



Could be the board for the hexagonal one, with .'s empty intersections and -'s vacant spaces (i.e. each pair of dashes is just denoting a hexagonal region, not a place to play stones)

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
$$SS..SS..SS..SS..SS
$$..SS..SS..SS..SS..
$$SS..SS..SS..SS..SS
$$..SS..SS..SS..SS..[/go]

(replaced dashes with S's since the go tag didn't like dashes.)

Edit: My diagram is still not displaying. What's wrong with it?

Edit: Fixed

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
$$|..|..|..|..|..|
$$..|..|..|..|..|..
$$|..|..|..|..|..|
$$..|..|..|..|..|..
$$|..|..|..|..|..|
$$..|..|..|..|..|..[/go]

More cryptic looking, perhaps?

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
$$--..--..--..--..--
$$..--..--..--..--..
$$--..--..--..--..--
$$..--..--..--..--..
$$--..--..--..--..--
$$..--..--..--..--..[/go]

Better? (This is with dashes, which do work.)

Pentagon tiling is also possible (though the pentagons are not regular), with intersections having varying numbers of liberties.

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KGS 4 kyu - Game Archive - Keyboard Otaku

That would make my head hurt.

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
--
My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com