• Endo

    From Michael Amundsen@21:1/5 to All on Wed Feb 15 00:05:29 2017
    Hi! This is a (quite possibly broken) game that I made. It is essentially a boardless version of Atari Go with an obligatory movement added to each turn, but that changes a lot. The edges of the «board» are player created and surrounded by the pieces,
    instead of the other way around. One could call it Inverted Atari Go (not to be confused with Anti Atari Go), or Endo-Go. I have started thinking of it as simply «Endo». Even if this game is broken, playing it has been an aesthetically pleasing
    experience. Still, I would love suggestions for how to make it a workable game.

    The rules (without flavor):

    (1) The game is played on an unbounded imagined square grid by two players that each have a sufficient supply of markers colored in their own color (one player has black markers and the other white, say).
    (2) On a player's turn they (i) place one of their markers and, if they can, (ii) move another of the markers they may have on the "board".
    (3) Moving a marker is always moving it to one of the ends of the row it's on or the column it's in. More precisely, you move it in one of the 4 cardinal directions, passing over at least 1 other marker, until it reaches the first space where there are
    no other markers further along in that direction along that line. Moving a marker westward along its row amounts to making that marker the westmost marker on its row, and is only allowed if it wasn't already the westmost marker before the movement. Ditto
    for the other 3 cardinal directions (replacing "row" with "column" where appropriate).
    (4) Placing and moving a marker is only constrained by one other rule: Any placed marker must at all times be connected to all others by a chain of orthogonal or diagonal adjacencies.
    (5) The object of the game is to deprive one of your opponent's groups of all its liberties.
    (6) A group is one marker or several same-colored markers that are connected by a chain of orthogonal adjacencies.
    (7) The liberties of a group are the empty squares that (i) are orthogonally adjacent to the markers that make up the group, and (ii) are not inside a closed loop of orthogonally or diagonally adjacent markers.
    (8) Empty squares that are inside a closed loop of orthogonally or diagonally adjacent markers are holes.
    (9) A hole does not count as a liberty for its adjacent markers.
    (10) If one move deprives groups of both colors of its liberties, the group(s) belonging to the player that made the move is deprived first, making it a losing move.

    The terminology that gives the flavor of the game is given and exemplified in the following:

    The markers are «cells» and the connected lot of them is «the organism». The placing of a cell is its «birth» and a case of the organism «growing». The movement of a cell is a «change» in the organism.

    The connectedness of the cells referred to in rule (4) is «the unity of the organism». The rule can then be said to restrict growth and change by insisting that newborn cells are part of the unity of the organism and that a change never disrupts this
    unity.

    Rule (2) becomes: On each turn the organism must grow, and growth that can be followed by change, must.

    The first move is always the birth of a single-celled organism out of nothing. On the second move the organism grows by the birth of a different colored cell connected to the old cell, and from this point on the organism is conflicted; it consists of two
    different types of cells trying to destroy each other.

    For any other purpose than being precise about liberties in the rules, I think of a chain of orthogonally adjacent holes as one hole. Once you understand how the holes inside the organism is like the outside of a Go board, no confusion should arise from
    this natural use of «hole».

    I have posted some illustrations in a (less clean and compact) post at BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/article/25070957#25070957

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  • From Michael Amundsen@21:1/5 to All on Thu Feb 16 03:59:04 2017
    Here's a pdf with an example game between "x" and "o" where o is playing very defensively:

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6qSZzjo4K1ydkpZVnh0N0xMMWM/view?usp=sharing

    I'm starting to think this is a workable game.

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