igpay
Joined 12 years ago
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680
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64
Member since
Mar 15
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 months ago
I mentioned this in another comment but I think it's just kind of hard to learn without the context of knowing how to play Go... I don't think it's a matter of being dumb. For me, learning Go was very much the same way where I had absolutely no idea what was going on and the amount of possible choices was very overwhelming. Also, fwiw the easy bot is not very easy. It mostly feels to me like the hard bot but it makes more mistakes.
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
Comment · 2 months ago
Thanks! Yes, I'm still unsure about how much you can stray from playing tightly connected. I mentioned this in another thread, but I think part of the problem is that the small board is too small. Even though it's 9x9 stones in dimensions, you can "span" the board with only 6 or 7 stones due to the way connectivity works. I think this makes it a bit too hard to play disconnected, but watching some games from stronger players, I think they play less tight and still find a way to win, so idk.
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
Comment · 2 months ago
Hey there, thanks! You might already know this, but if you hover your stone around or turn on "Group View" mode you can see solid colored lines between stones. These indicate whether or not they're close enough to prevent cuts, and are really important. Other than that, I think that the uncertainty and need for estimating is kind of intentional - it's a lot more handwavey than normal Go.
Hope that helps!
Comment · 2 months ago
Thanks for playing! There's a little plus sign that displays on the most recent stone - although I often get lost searching for it so it can probably be made bigger.
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 :)
Comment · 2 months ago
Thanks! I think that the high CPU utilization is probably the bot itself. It's a full-blown neural net running in-browser, so it's definitely a resource hog. If you ever play against a human performance should be much better (though please let me know if that's not the case).
Comment · 2 months ago
Thanks for playing! I don't have a ranking in traditional Go, but after tens of hours playing this game I'd generally agree with your assessment.
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.
Comment · 2 months ago
Thanks for playing! Yeah, the mobile experience is pretty wonky still. I mostly use it to respond to correspondence games when I'm afk but otherwise I think most people prefer to play on desktop.
Comment · 2 months ago
Thanks for the feedback - the tutorial is definitely dense. It existed a long time before the bot did, so it had to cover everything in one sitting. I think now though that you're probably right about an improved tutorial flow being mostly playing + some explanation.
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!
Comment · 3 months ago
It is not yet but the game is still under active development and bots have been requested. If you’re interested in getting updates on development, the discord (linked on the site) has been gaining some traction. I’ll be posting updates there.
The time control implemented currently is that you start with a base amount of time and get additional time for each move. I believe it’s referred to as Fischer time which makes me think it’s related to chess, but I’m unsure how prevalent it is in chess or go.
https://csun.io