Bigger Board? TWIXT PP

37 replies. Last post: 2020-06-07

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Bigger Board?
  • lguser at 2018-09-18

    I believe that 24by24 is far too small to experience a truly epic witful strategic clever and free feeling game of Twixt, I hope that the developer does add boards of much larger size, I think 48by48 would be nice but might be too big for some, since Havannah has sizes between 4-8 with boards of size of every whole number in between, I hope that the developer can also make there be such a big number of sizes for Twixt which is one of the more popular games on the website. Do you agree?

  • Tommah at 2018-09-18

    I have Twixt on my game site ( https://new.amecy.com).  I can start a large-board Twixt tournament if some people are interested.

  • Christian0 at 2018-09-19

    Agreed 24x24 is rather small for Twixt - the strategic possibilities are a bit limited. Bigger boards would be nice the only issue might be that we get fewer players playing since the same number of players will split among the different options.

  • Tommah at 2018-09-20

    I see that a few people have signed up on my site recently.  If you signed up to play in the Twixt tournament, you can join the tournament here: https://new.amecy.com/main/tournaments  The board size is 48 x 48.

  • ypercube at 2018-09-20

    I will play - although I would prefer something not so huge.

    48 is 4 times as large as 24. I'd prefer something around 32 - 36.

  • Maciej Celuch at 2018-09-20

    i have never played a different board size than 24x24. So it would be nice to play a bigger one. My intuition says that 36x36 would be sufficient.

  • DrJochum at 2018-09-21

    Some time ago I was comparing different aspects of Hex, Go and Twixt with a friend of mine. We had the impression that the general game feeling was rather similar in comparison to other games.

    We also discussed which board sizes would be comparable. We thought that Twixt 24x24 would be equal to Go an a 13x13 board or even a 11x11 board.

    There is still a lot to explore on a 13x13 go board; the same is true for Twixt 24x24 of course.However, it defenitely is interesting to try a bigger board.

    I would like to try something smaller than 36x36; maybe 32x32.

  • Florian Jamain at 2018-09-21

    Clearly ridiculous to play on 48 by 48, far too big.

    36 and even 32 would be far enough to change everything.

  • Florian Jamain at 2018-09-21

    My intuition would be that 28 by 28 is probably very different already cause the classic pattern connection won't connect easily, say that 2 patterns can connect top and bottom in some situation, if now you need 3, the game will be far different.

    Clearly a good idea but I guess you could try step by step, around 30 is probably already a lot.

  • DrJochum at 2018-09-22

    I agree with Florians reasoning.

    Do you think that there is any chance that we get a bigger board at little golem?

  • Christian0 at 2018-09-22

    I don't think many would enjoy playing on a 48x48 board, it's way way beyond huge really. Even 36x36 is enormous and probably the highest we can go. I think about 30x30 would be a nice size and it's still significantly larger than 24x24. So I'd say at least 30x30 and at most 36x36.

  • David J Bush ★ at 2018-09-23

    We can talk a lot about different grid sizes, but until we play some specific size a lot, or some software does it for us, we won't really know what the resulting game is like. I suspect a relatively minor increase will have a huge impact. For personal aesthetic reasons, I would like to see a grid size divisible by 3, and for the sake of any future board manufacturing, it should also be divisible by 2. So I suggest we test out 30x30. There's also an upper limit on how much grid size a cell phone can be used for.

  • DrJochum at 2018-09-23

    But if we decide to try out 30x30 (which is fine for me), we still do not have it at littleGolem…

  • David J Bush ★ at 2018-09-23

    Of course “we” must include Richard, to play here on LG. In the meantime, perhaps we could play on amecy.com

  • Tommah at 2018-09-28

    I have opened a 30 x 30 Twixt tournament here: https://new.amecy.com/main/tournaments

  • David J Bush ★ at 2018-10-01

    Is there any time control imposed for this tournament? Thanks for helping to start a tradition!

  • Richard Malaschitz ★ at 2018-10-03

    30x30 added

  • Richard Malaschitz ★ at 2018-10-03

    48x48 added

  • ypercube at 2018-10-03

    wow and thnx Richard!

  • lguser at 2018-10-03

    +1

  • Florian Jamain at 2018-10-04

    Amazing :D

  • David J Bush ★ at 2018-10-04

    Thanks Richard!

  • David J Bush ★ at 2018-10-04

    AHA! I just realized one possible reason why the coordinates are missing from the new board display. The English alphabet has just 26 letters. We would need more symbols for the larger grids. Also Richard's sgf notation for the game record relies on the English alphabet for both coordinates. And I don't know if that text is ASCII, or UTF-8, or what.

    With regard to 30x30, one might add four Greek letters which are clearly different from any English letter. For example, lowercase alpha and beta, uppercase gamma and delta. It's a kludge, but it's possible.

    But for 48x48, some Greek letters look too much IMO like an English letter in both upper and lower case: epsilon, eta, iota, kappa, omicron, rho, tau, and chi. If those were left out, that would leave us six symbols short. One might cobble together other symbols to make a mishmash solution, but then players would have to remember the order if they want to talk about moves. What a mess.

    Jtwixt can handle boards up to 36x36. After Z, we have AA, AB, …, AI, AJ. So theoretically this approach could handle up to 676x676. But this is completely at odds with the form of SGF Richard uses for his text files.

    So, for 48x48, maybe one approach would be: Don't have coordinates and don't worry about it. But four Greek letters for 30x30 might be acceptable.

    What do you think?

  • eobllor ★ at 2018-10-04

    I'm more in favour of …Y Z AA AB…, for its extendability. By the way, with this approach, you can reach beyond coordinate 676, namely up to coordinate 702 (= 27*26) with <= 2 letters, and by adding another letter whenever required you can go on for ever.

    I'd be interested in knowing which encoding is used in the SGF files, because not having figured it out, I haven't been able parse the 37*37 Go records yet!

  • Tommah at 2018-10-04

    David, the tournament time control on my site is one week per move.

  • David J Bush ★ at 2018-10-06

    Thanks Tommah.

    Another thing occurs to me. 48x48 is just insane. There's no way to see the whole board on a cell phone, for example. Even with 24x24 I can't read what's going on with my phone unless I magnify so that not all of the board is visible at once. My PC monitor is 1080 pixels high. If you add rows top and bottom for coordinate labels, that's 21 pixels per row maximum. And Richard probably has fewer pixels than that to work with.

    The whole point a larger grid, I thought, was to allow for grand full-board strategic schemes. But how is a poor human going to find a full board scheme if he or she can't see the whole board at once?

    As far as I am concerned, it would be fine with me if Richard just introduces 30x30 and wait to see if people still complain that's not enough.

  • Florian Jamain at 2018-10-06

    Told you, 48 by 48 is ridiculously too big :D

  • ypercube at 2018-10-06

    Yeah, about as ridiculous as Go 37x37 …

  • lguser at 2018-10-06

    Just make the holes smaller and denser packed together.

  • _syLph_ at 2018-10-06

    lol, go 37x37 is way more ridiculous. if it wasnt for UI issues i dont think the size would be that unreasonable tbh.

  • Tasmanian Devil at 2020-05-31

    Are games on the bigger boards rated in the same way as on 24x24?

  • David J Bush ★ at 2020-05-31

    In TwixtPP, all sizes are lumped together into a single rating system. However, in Hex, 13 and 19 are separate.

  • Tasmanian Devil at 2020-05-31

    Thanks. I think I have seen instances of one rating for all sizes but different weighting, but maybe that was Dragon go server or something.

  • mtbikesman at 2020-06-04

    Back in the 70's we played on a 36 X 36 board (graph paper) and we also had some super moves (only one of each per game)

    the 2 x 2 connection

    the 3 x 1 connection

    the iron bullet - it would replace an opponent's peg if it were not connected to anything

    the hacksaw connection - it would cut an opponent's connection.

    It made for an entirely different game.

  • ypercube at 2020-06-04

    Interesting ideas!

  • David J Bush ★ at 2020-06-04

    These special rules sound fundamentally similar to the Privilege call in 4 player Twixt, inasmuch as it would usually be disadvantageous to be the first side to use it. So I guess that mostly they would be used in the endgame, with the possible exception of the iron bullet which might be used earlier. Of course the threats of using these moves could heavily influence the opening and middle game, which would actually be distinct phases on a 36 grid.

    This thread started out about suggesting a change for Richard to implement, which he subsequently did, and I want to make clear I don't personally want this variant here. Of course mtbikesman did not suggest that it be implemented here.

  • mtbikesman at 2020-06-07

    I thought if I got all the super-moves and David Bush got none of them I could finally win a game.

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