Life In 19x19

Here's a game you can play on a Go board. It's called Crossway.


Black moves first. There is no capturing. Players attempt to build a path of stones of their color, each adjacent to the next horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, which connects their border rows. The following patterns on any 2x2 section of the board are forbidden:


The first move confers a strong advantage, so the pie rule is used to balance the game. After black places the first stone on the board, the other player has the option, at that point only, to swap sides.

If a player has no legal move, the opponent plays again. This was invented by Mark Steere, who is not me.

Other, relatively better known connection games are Hex (Piet Hein) and Twixt (Alex Randolph.)


So yeah, like, groovy baby. Take a walk on the wild side.

Peyrol wrote:[..] Mark Steere, who is not me.

[..]

Might really be a good idea to state this explicitly.

So, everybody: Neither is he me I’m quite sure.

meh, I'd rather just play Chinese Checkers.

Or better yet, Go.

Bonobo wrote:

Peyrol wrote:[..] Mark Steere, who is not me.

[..]

Might really be a good idea to state this explicitly.
...

Yes, I thought that might be the case. I'm new here and seek to avoid offending anyone. I believe an abstract game should not be judged based on who invented it.

What, Chinese Checkers? Aw c'mon. Twixt is reeeeeally kewl.

To me this feels like it would be an uninteresting game. The no crosscut rule means that 1 point jumps are uncuttable. The fact that 1 point jumps are uncuttable means that elephant jumps are uncuttable. Attachments virtually force a staircase shape to the edge of the board.

A one point jump is very resilient, but not always uncuttable. For example,


Black's D4 threatens E5 and also threatens to cut white's one point jump with C5.

Whether Crossway is interesting or not is a matter of personal taste, but at least it is reasonably balanced with the pie rule, especially on a 19x19 grid. Compared to Hex, it is much faster on the same "size" grid. I have never seen a winning Crossway path "go backwards," meaning step closer to the border you are already connected to before connecting to the other border. In Hex, this happens frequently. But you can make full-board moves, and force a winning path with an S-curve to it. Maybe on an even larger grid, you could double back.

If you are interested enough to prove me wrong, we could play on the turn based server Gamerz (my handle is chmeee) or the realtime server Game Center where my handle is Peyrol. My email is twixtfanatic atsymbol gmail period com

Peyrol wrote:A one point jump is very resilient, but not always uncuttable. For example,

Ah my comments were made under the general go player understanding of "This will hold true assuming you do not ignore two moves in the local area". Just about anything is possible if you can assume your opponent will never respond.