Toridal Go

November 30th, 2008
games
Rick and I have been playing 9x9 toroidal Go. It's pretty neat. The idea of playing Go on the surface of a torus had been kicking around my head for a while. In concept it's very simple -- you need make only a small alteration to a single rule. When you compute adjacency, treat opposing edges as connecting. For example, the four corners of the board form a 2x2 square. This is really hard to visualize, which is why I'd not actually taken the trouble to play.

Over the thanksgiving break, though, I had an idea. The board is 19x19, so there's room -- with some left over -- for four 9x9 boards. If you play 9x9 Go in quadruplicate, then you can see the toroidal adjacencies and play sort of normally. It's a little annoying to have to place four pieces for every move, but you get really fast at it.

The strategey changes, though, are pretty hard to think about. I'm definitely not yet used to a world without edges.

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