Show HN: Voronoi Go
33 points by igpay 3 hours ago | 7 comments
I posted once before but wanted to share again because a lot has changed. There's now a fairly strong bot to play against (contributed by a community member) and also correspondence games. The combination of these things helps a bit in finding people to play against.

pmontra 40 minutes ago
Very well done. I had to enable desktop mode on a phone because the help dialog hides the board and the Next button is some meter below the bottom edge of the screen. That's the only issue and the site warns that it's best played on a desktop. Everything else is very well done and it's really a game of go, with eyes, invasions, connections, cuts.
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igpay 13 minutes 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.
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xerox13ster 45 minutes ago
Gonna be honest, this got a click from me as a golang developer having just come from the terminal multiplexer thread and I fully expected this to be about developing voronoi cells in golang.

I don't know Go well enough to even begin to conceptualize how deeply this changes the rules and interactions of the game, so I'm not going to be able to comment on the concept itself, but I bounced off the tutorial the first time and by the end of it had no desire to play a full game against a bot.

Maybe if the tutorial had walked me through the beginning and middle of the match with the bot and engineered the match so that the tutorial scenarios appeared within that game, it would have felt like less of a committment to actually start a full game.

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igpay 16 minutes 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!

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wavemode 18 minutes ago
To be fair, a game of this only takes a few minutes. Probably best as a "learn by doing" type of thing.
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emaro 41 minutes ago
Looks really cool. Saved for later because I'm on my phone right now. Ignored the warning and it was fine but the site refreshed sometimes which restarted the tutorial. The third time I gave up.
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runarberg 7 minutes ago
5 kyu in normal go here: I played a couple of games and got crushed by the AI. Groups are much harder to kill in this game, so having a large group of connected stones with zero or one eyes (what we call “dragons” in normal go) is a much better strategy (I think) then to create potentials in the corners.

This is counter to the best strategy in normal go. We actually have a saying that “big dragons never die”, however it is actually an anti-proverb, because most dragons can be harassed while your opponent builds territory. So even if your dragons lives, you wasted a lot of stones keeping your dragon alive, while your opponent was calmly building territory, and gaining points.

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