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XiaGo |
| The weird thing is that inventing games is actually a way to relax for me, with no effort at all. I'm playing online and discussing stuff at the BGG abstract forum and when I'm doing nothing, which I do a lot lately, then the mind wanders off into the abstact, not in search for anything in particular, just looking at what happens to come along. There were a lot of territorial ideas on a hex grid lately, Go variants in particular. The hex grid has too many liberties to literally transpose Go to it and several new methods to reduce it were suggested and some were implemented like Keil by Luis Bolaños Mures and Nick Bentley's Blooms. I had long ago invented Medusa that solves the problem by using a hexagonal sub-grid that brings the numbers of liberties back to the familiar 4, 3 and 2 for the inner area, the edges and the corners respectively. Now Blooms uses four colours, two belonging to each player and there had been much talk about three colours, one for each player and one neutral colour. It's an intruiging concept and Mark Steere once made Redstone on it, which is square and a bit lengthy and anyway, I suddenly thought "what if the 'holes' in the Medusa board were movable neutral pieces whose only function is to reduce the average number of liberties"? And that was it, basically, except that Medusa has othelloanian capture and a move option for groups, neither of which are required here. Enschede, november 2020 christian freeling |