A final whisper

YvY
This is getting a bit awkward. I stopped inventing games for lack of ambition. Dameo happened unintentionally, and so did HanniBall, though the way it did was fun and the result quite unusual. Now I must confess it happened again.

A month ago I started a new thread at the LG Hex/Havannah Forum, called YvY. It was a game, or rather the contours of a game that came to me the night before, while rethinking Superstar.
Superstar is not a bad game, but it lacks structural simplicity. It had always been a nagging loose end. So when I suddenly saw the concept of a 'star' and a 'superstar' merge, and saw that I simultaneously could use the 'loop' as an absolute criterion to win, instead as an addition to the count, I realized I might have missed the true game here.

But I was too quick. I posted the immature rules the next morning in the thread at LG mentioned above, and also in a thread at the Arimaa Forum that has this essay and the claims therein as its subject.

What happened next can be read in those threads, but among the various reactions, the comments of David J Bush, a top ranking Twixt player, stood out. In his quest to eliminate draws from the concept he not only suggested a switch from double cells to single cells along te edges, but also drew my attention to a flaw in the old version of Star and Superstar alike that I had failed to realize. Consider this:
  • In the old version of Star and in Superstar, a 'star' is a group of connected stones belonging to one player that touches at least three cells of the edge. The score of a star is the number of edge hexagons it touches minus two.
  • In Superstar a 'superstar' is the same in 5-fold: A superstar is a chain connecting at least 3 sides. The value of a superstar is 5*(S-2) where 'S' is the number of sides it connects.

The point being that the value zero and in Superstar's case negative values, are avoided by definition. This makes that attempting a new star or superstar isn't any more risky than the next move, thus essentially draining the games of some of the tension between the center and the edge. This must have occured to the inventor formerly known as Craige Schensted too, because in the new version of Star it has been ironed out.
Superstar doesn't actually suffer from it because it doesn't have much of a center to begin with, and rigorous consistency would only complicate an already complicated count. So I'll leave it to its somewhat oblivious existence.

YvY base 4,5YvY however is a different story. Under David's suggestions the original dual 'bricks' had been replaced by single 'sprouts'.

By doing so YvY's way of eliminating draws could mimic Star's, that is by using a special hexagonal board, with alternating even and odd numbers of sprouts along the edges. The score division should always be even versus odd, excluding draws.

I'm not against the occasional draw: in Havannah they're so rare they're considered a bonus. But going though such lengths as to use a special board, should of course lead to the required result. And at this point a bump in he road occured in the emergence of 'bad sprouts' - vacant sprouts that were disadvantageous to occupy for both players. And sprout that cannot be claimed by either player would upset the odd/even division on which the elimination of draws was based.
Fortunately, after having a long look at them - too long in fact before seeing the obvious - they turned out to be a mirage resulting from my own sloppy way of looking at the game. Consider this:
  • Groups live if they count at least one sprout, otherwise they're dead. At the end of the game, dead groups are removed before the count.
  • The removal of a dead group may leave an enclosed stone or group in friendly territory: such a stone or group is considered an integral part of the enclosing group.
  • Vacant sprouts inside a players territory belong to that player.

Very Go like, and the end of bad sprouts: at the end of a game ownership of any particular sprout should always be unambiguous.

Life starts out neutral: If a group takes its first sprout, it takes one point from the opponent and adds one point to the moving player's total. But it also starts a new life group at the cost of two points, making the net result zero.
Of course any connection it now makes to another life group will add two points to the connecting player's total.

As for YvY's behaviour, my predictions haven't changed after losing its first game ever, against Ed van Zon. I predict it will turn out to hold the middle between Havannah and Go. Since I consider Go as 'deeper and wider' than Havannah, the same holds to a degree for YvY. I haven't had much support for this viewpoint yet, but then, it took Havannah a quarter of a century to be discovered on a more or less significant scale. One can always remain hopeful.

Since David's contributions to the game were crucial, I'm quite happy to consider YvY a joint invention. It has always been the game rather than the inventor that was important for me and I like the way YvY turned out. So much in fact that I've no intention to beat that, because I'm truly drained of any and all ambition in the realm of game inventing.
So thanks David, and even more so thanks Ed, and thank you all, and this is it.


enschede, november 25, 2009

christian freeling
 
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