Larger Board for Conhex Other games

14 replies. Last post: 2020-11-02

Reply to this topic Return to forum

Larger Board for Conhex
  • ypaul21 at 2020-09-12

    Hi! It doesn’t look like we have a Conhex forum, so I’ll just post here.

    I’ve recently been seeing 15x15 Hex and size 7 Catchup and I think that they are wonderful additions to this site. I was wondering if anyone else would be interested in a larger Conhex board.

    I think we currently have a 9x9 board for Conhex, but perhaps a 13x13 one might be interesting to mirror Go and Slither.

    We have different board sizes for almost every game of this sort now except for this one.

  • add3993 at 2020-09-12

    I think it's a great proposal, partly because the Conhex board is irregular and the question of which larger board design to use is an interesting one.

  • ypaul21 at 2020-09-13

    It’s not actually that irregular. Someone on bgg has created larger boards for print:

    https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/198115/larger-boards-conhex1-2-and-3

  • add3993 at 2020-09-14

    I agree that's the most natural extension, but I think part of the design intention was to balance central moves by making less-central cells easier to capture, and that effect is diluted on these larger boards.

  • David J Bush ★ at 2020-09-14

    Well what alternate design do you have in mind add3993?

  • metzgerism at 2020-09-14

    David wants ConPex

  • add3993 at 2020-09-15

    You could (for example) “cool down” the center by adding a seventh vertex to each of the four central hexagons, so they now have threshold 4 for capture; and the middle 4+1 gon becomes an 8-gon with threshold 4 as well.

    I'm not saying this is better, just that it tries to extend a certain something present in the original design to balance with the larger size.

  • ypaul21 at 2020-09-15

    I don't know if that's necessary. On a much larger board like the 13x13, it feels like the increase in the number of potential paths could potentially make up for the versatility of having captured the centre (also considering that with the pie rule, you can potentially have a more useful stone on a larger board that's closer to the centre). On the 9x9, the centre region is useless enough already. If you're increasing the capture threshold for the regions close to it as well, you might as well just remove those spaces from the board. But that's just as far as my observation goes anyway as a player who's on the much weaker side.

    I would actually really love to see Pex on here!

  • brzy at 2020-09-19

    The board in Conhex is in a way irregular, but I would say the version we have on Littlegolem is 11x11 as there are 11 rows of nodes. In total 69 (17x4+1) nodes and 41 (10*4+1) spaces.

    The larger version would be 13x13. In total 105 (26*4+1) nodes and 61 (15*4+1) spaces. I think this is what we can start from on LG.

    BTW, the larger boards presented on BGG have no nodes in corners. I don't know what's the reason for that. I would not resign from corner nodes.

  • ypaul21 at 2020-09-19

    Oh yeah, it is indeed 11x11. I also just noticed the lack of corner nodes. I also think that the corners are very important.

    The centre node is too weak on the 11x11, but everywhere else feels strong, so I would usually swap if my opponent places anywhere besides the centre. We might get to see a more interesting start from the pie rule if the board was larger.

  • ypaul21 at 2020-09-19

    Would a 15x15 board be a much more exciting jump compared to just the 13x13?

  • brzy at 2020-09-19

    As an advocate of gradual development I'd rather try on the smaller one, but let the developer of this site make decision.

    I made a calculation regarding the nodes and spaces in conhex. I assumed that we do not change the pattern of the board and we have corner nodes.

    Size    Nodes    Spaces

    11    69    41

    13    105    61

    15    149    85

    17    201    113

    19    261    145

  • brzy at 2020-09-19

    Of course, there can be three sizes of conhex: 11, 13 and 15. The same is with Twixt (24, 30, 48).

  • David J Bush ★ at 2020-11-02

    ConPex sounds interesting but I would be very happy just to see standard Pex implemented here, and that discussion might be more appropriate for the Hex etc. forum or the General forum.

    As long as the edge cells have just 3 nodes, that makes connecting along the edges much faster, and the cells close to the edge would necessarily play a role in that, so I don't see any problem with the “natural” extension to larger grid sizes. It would definitely make a deeper game.

Return to forum

Reply to this topic