Hey,

diego44 and I created a forum concentrated on Dots and Boxes. This might appear exaggerated or childish but we find that it's an absolute necessity for a game to have a website focussed on that game and that game alone if you want it to be played actively and on a higher level. Littlegolem is great for playing and should always be the platform we play the game on, but the aspect of discussing theory is coming a bit short here, simply because LG's forum is not made to bundle knowledge tidied.

Our focus regarding the forum lies on 4 major aspects we'd like to boost:

1 The “Competetive Discussion”-Forum: Supposed to supply an overview on the current metagame and improve it — where players discuss different strategies, the efficiency of certain play-styles, opening tendencies and so on. A larger project we want to work on is to compile an elaborate opening library, supplying an opening-tree with descriptions to as many opening positions as possible.

2 The “Articles”-Forum: This is where knowledge gathers. A collection of articles around the web that spares one the trouble of using google to find something interesting on a desperate search. More importantly we want to offer a place where you can present your thoughts and researches in an article compiled by yourself.

3 The “Game Analysis”-Forum: Playing games is the absolute best way to gather experience and some games are really interesting. Interesting to such an extend that they deserve more attention. We can learn from the games others played and detect mistakes that we eventually learn to understand better and improve our understanding from post-game-analysis. This forum is the place where you can publish own analyses, request some from games you find very interesting or analyse with others.

4 The “Mentorship Program”-Forum: This is one of the biggest if not the biggest point for us. What the game needs is not necessarily a large number of experienced players but rather learning trainees. Littlegolem is a harsh environment for newcomers, you enter a tournament and get crushed by some guy endlessly stronger than yourself, lose all your fighting-spirit, stop playing and don't come back to play ever again. Experienced players however shouldn't be a wall for newcomers but rather a trampoline that helps them jump. This forum is used to organize a system in which newcomers can ask for a teacher to have them assist their growth. Everybody can apply as a mentor and/or a student. We also support the idea of already experienced players learning from those even more experienced.

Putting these 4 major points aside there's also forums dedicated to videos, software (bots, tools), small talk and tournaments of different formats.

We hope that you like our ideas and would very much appreciate any participants on our “DromedaryBoard”:http://w11.zetaboards.com/DromedaryBoard/index/

Greetings,

diego44 and Dryad

Wow, the link ate our greetings but is working nevertheless

Waoh this is impressive!

Would you care to put wccanard papers in the article session?

Is there a RSS feed so we can be informed of new content posted?

Will it be free?

I like the games analysis section,  I can understand the analysis ;)

Thanks a lot.

wccanard's papers are already in the article section.

So far we have no idea about RSS, so a RSS feed probably won't happen, unless we get some voluntary support from some more knowledgable person.

Registration is completely free and for now you can even see content without having registered (however in order to post you need to).

That is pretty cool :) I will definitely join.

Sound good!

Hey,

first of all many thanks for the positive response!

It seems like everyone is hanging on for now, so I decided to publish an analysis of a top player match (#1453976) in the game analysis section: w11.zetaboards.com/DromedaryBoard/topic/10362708/1.

Feedback is much appreciated, furthermore I hope to make players enter the discussion.

Also I added some puzzles in the puzzle section, however, those of you who regularly read the Dots forum at lg should know most of these already.

Greetings,

diego44

Just published a brand new puzzle: http://w11.zetaboards.com/DromedaryBoard/topic/10369495/1/

I added a puzzle study in http://w11.zetaboards.com/DromedaryBoard/topic/10390834/1/…

Cool inititiative.

I think dots and boxes is a pretty mysterious game for people who don't know it – in fact for many it's hard to imagine there is any strategy involved. So perhaps this new site can help to show new players that the game really is rich in strategy and give them a way to learn.

I'm not too involved with dots and boxes anymore, so I don't think I can contribute a lot, but I'll definitely try to make some posts.

One thing I would advise though is to reduce the number of subforums, because in the beginning there will be few posts in each of them. Once there are more posters you can add some if necessary to reduce clutter, but now I think there's too much structure. Up to you though, of course :)

Oh I just remembered that wccanard once wrote some scripts to compile all (high-level) games played on littlegolem and jijbent.nl into a database, which he could use to look up positions and see win/loss statistics and such. I don't know if you guys have any experience with coding, but I can send you his code if you'd like.

It would be really cool if someone wrote a script which automatically downloads finished games on this site and stores them in a database, which you can explore to find opening statistics and look up all games with a certain position, a bit like they do in chess (like here http://www.365chess.com/opening.php). I had some plans to do that once, but I never did for some reason.

If you like coding or want to learn it, perhaps it could be a fun little project.

Thanks flipster. I am looking forward to your posts!

Regarding the database: Both Dryad and me have little experience in coding, so this probably won't happen in the near future. :/ Although of course volunteers are welcome ; after all this kind of statistics would be indeed really interesting.