Slither

There are many strong players for Hex and Twixt but only a few good players for Slither, I don't understand why.

The game is quite new, but not so new.
This does not explain the fact, I think.

Slither is really a nice game, really different than all the other connection games, because of the possibility of moving a piece.

You really should to try it.

Well, compared to Hex (1942) and Twixt (1962), I think Slither (2010) can be considered pretty new. :)

But yes, it is a quite good game well worth playing!

Hex13 has 8 masters (over 2200) and a total of 27 over 2000
Hex19 has only 1 master and only a total of 5 over 2000!
Twixt has 12 masters and a total of 30 players over 2000
Slither has zero masters and only two players over 2000.

Eventually when Slither is not so new, it should be on par with Hex19. (it can take years for the truly strong players to get their rating up if they don't play often) My question is why is there such a huge discrepancy in the number of strong players between Hex13 and Hex19?

@Ray: Hex19 takes too long! (IMHO)

I think the main reason Hex19 has few highly-rated players is that there are very few Hex19 players in total. There needs to be a large community of players in order for anyone to reach high ratings.

Suppose, for example, that the 8 "masters" from Hex13 suddenly started playing Hex19 all day. What would happen? Well, they'd probably beat almost everyone else, but since most Hex19 players have very low ratings, they won't gain ratings very fast. These 8 players would also play against each other, but that won't contribute anything to their ratings.

This is a problem with the Elo system - it's slow to converge, and it doesn't perform well when the skills of the players vary too drastically.

@Ray: I think it's a reflection of the number of players and the number of games played. I suspect the ratings of the active players are distributed in a bell-shaped curve with a mean somewhere over 1500 (because those rated below 1500 are more likely to leave).

A greater number of players means the tails of the distribution are more heavily populated once equilibrium is reached.
And some number of games is needed to get the observed standard deviation up to its equilibrium value. For any number of players if the number of games played so far is zero, the standard deviation of the ratings (all of which are 1500) is zero.

shalev: "Suppose, for example, that the 8 “masters” from Hex13 suddenly started playing Hex19 all day."

The other consequence is I'd lose my job. :)

More seriously, I agree with shalev and Marley, about it being a direct relationship to fewer players and fewer games. The fewer games may also be related to the games being longer, so fewer finished games per unit time spent playing.

Ofc this is the main problem, there is only few Slither players.
The question is ... why ?

The creation dates of the games are not really meaningful, for example, I discovered Hex, Twixt and Slither on LG almost the same time.

If you were typical, then playing slither would be typical.

Of course the creation dates of the games are meaningful! Consider a more extreme case: a new game is published today. We wouldn't expect it to have as many players as Hex or Twixt, would we?

All else being equal, of course an older game has more players than a newer game.

Many (probably the vast majority of) Hex and Twixt players discovered those games before Slither even existed.

Slither is a very new game compared to Hex and Twixt and arrived on LG relatively recently. LG already featured connection games Hex and Twixt, and perhaps Havannah and LOA may also be seen as connection games. Perhaps those people drawn to this genre were already heavily invested in one of the other connection games. However, I see Slither as a remarkably elegant solution to the stand-off position when Hex-like games are played on a squared board. I'm sure it will prosper.

I hope it will.

Strong Hex and TwixT players should try it.

Hex and twixt are too concrete and mathematical for me - I love the dynamic nature of slither, it's a great game. In particular I like the way you can sacrifice something good you made earlier in order to make the next thing you build even better.

Is there any literature on Slither strategies?

Of course not (-;

There is no question in my mind that following builds up over time. I only found LG because I remembered playing Twixt in 1984, and went searching for it I guess 20 years later. mtbikesman tells a similar story, I think.

Those who like slither, and particularly those who prefer slither to hex, should also consider trying Akron (see http://www.iggamecenter.com/info/en/akron.html). It solves Kerry Handscomb's "squared hex" problem (also solved by Crossway and Quax, both available on the same site) in a spectacular fashion.

I can second Akron as an excellent connection game. But my favorite is Larry Back's Onyx

A quick search didn't find any accessible rules for Akron.

Onyx's board initially looked intricate, and requiring an actual special board, but you can easily warp it back onto a square grid and put the right diagonal connections in (black has both diagonals, white only has one). Onyx did look a but zugzwangy - you don't want to place any third pieces, as the fourth piece will surely follow, and perform a capture. Is onyx provably finite?

Akron rules

So in Akron you cannot move a stone AND place a stone, this is a main difference.

In Slither, you MUST place a new stone each turn, then the number of moves in a game is bounded by the number of places. The size of a game of Akron is unbounded ... this is a problem for a game on LG. A championship could never end if there are "bad" players.

Moving a piece is "often" a good move or not ?
A serious game of Akron is very long or not ?

I agree that slither seems to have some nice properties Hex has and other connection games don't. It seems to be "pure" in that it has the following properties:

\* There is no zugzwang: playing a move is always good (and placing a piece is always good). Most connection games share this property (Go sort of doesn't though).
\* Pieces are always placed and never removed, so the board fills up. Most connection games share this property, but Go doesn't.
\* Once the board is full, exactly one person has formed their connection. This means the game does not feel like a race, with each player competing to complete their connection first; completing a connection necessarily blocks the opponent's connection. It also means there are no draws. Most other connection games do NOT have this property (this includes Havannah, Twixt, Connect 4/5/6, and many others).

This last property makes slither similar in flavor to Hex. In fact, I can't really think of any other game that satisfies all 3 properties, except for Hex variants like Y.

The main differences between slither and Hex are
\* Slither is played on a square board, which is easier to visualize.
\* Slither has moving pieces, which probably makes it harder to think many moves ahead.
\* Slither has something like n^3 possible moves (on board size n), while Hex has n^2.

Overall, Slither might share the pure, topological feel of Hex, but it might suffer from worse "clarity" (the ability to see many moves ahead).

(Disclaimer: I have not actually played Slither yet. It sounds cool, I might try it soon.)

Responding to FatPhil, I think Onyx games are necessarily finite, but I will check with Larry. Board geometry and capture rule make for baroque and interesting tactics. In particular, one's own pieces can be a liability - the "poison piece" idea. Slither, I think, may share this property - good players (and I am not) can confirm the the disposition of one's own pieces may hinder development because of the diagonal prohibition.

Oh, I forgot about the diagonal prohibition! Does that mean Slither can have zugzwangs?

@shalev: I don't think the diagonal restriction has anything to do with zugzwang because moving is optional and placing a new piece is always advantageous.

However, having to make the first move on an empty board with swap rules is arguably a zugzwang situation.

A piece is not always advantageous. Consider the following position where X is going left-right and O is going up-down.

@X O X X@
@X O x X@
@. . . X@
@X O x X@
@X O X X@

X cannot stop O from connecting, but if you remove either lower-case x......

shalev:

Luis Bolaños Mures has several connection games with those properties (board guaranteed to fill up, no ties/draws possible), e.g. Kopano, Loose, Quentin.

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/47001/luis-bolanos-mures

Quentin and Kopano have the same problem as Slither: having a stone could be bad, so there may be zugzwang.

Loose doesn't really have the property that at the end of the game, exactly one player wins... it's more like Go. Players can win by a bit or win by a lot. It doesn't have the weird property that Hex has, where at any point in time your two sides are already either CONNECTED or DISCONNECTED (and also that any attempt to connect directly interferes with the opponent's connection).

Anyway, I'm just being picky. These could all be great games.

Does 'fewer pieces can be better for you' necessarily imply zugzwang exists?

FatPhil: No. This is actually an interesting problem: Does Slither have zugzwang? Can you create such a position or show it can't exist?

I don't think that the property of games such as Slither and Onyx, where your own pieces may hinder your progress is at all bad. In fact, it contributes to interesting tactics. The zuzwang issue may only arise in highly unusual and/or theoretical positions.

On the topic of the finiteness of Onyx, the game's designer, Larry Back, writes,

"It is theoretically possible for two players to play an endless game of Onyx by continuously making captures and counter-captures on the same squares but this would only happen if both players conspired to do this. In reality, if either player is trying to win then Onyx will end in a victory for Black or White."

A very sensible attitude. Players engaging in cooperative cycles are indeed playing something, but not the game.

Hi all,

I'm Luis Bolaños Mures. Since Russ mentioned some of my games, I thought I'd chime in.

I suspect Russ mistook Loose for Vimbre. shalev, you're right, Loose is a territory game inspired by Go and not a connection game.

Anyway, Vimbre needs to be mentioned in this thread because it's sort of the static cousin of Slither. They're complementary games in a way.

Vimbre rules here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/130222/vimbre

And a sample game here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3gpl2WT8ufWY3UtZ1dnVXhpRjA/edit?usp=sharing

Vimbre and Slither have a number of similarities:

- They're played on square boards.

- They're drawless, and when the board is full, exactly one person will have formed their winning connection.

- They make use of the diagonal prohibition rule.

- In both games, there are two different types of moves available, and two actions can be performed on each turn. (However, in Vimbre, you can't make both types of moves on the same turn, and flipping a stone costs a whole turn.)

- Material balance is always preserved throughout the game (this is unlike Akron and Quentin, for instance).

The main difference is that, in Vimbre, all connections are permanent despite stones being sometimes flipped.

I recommend that those who like Slither give this game a try. Chances are they will like it as well.

As for zugzwang, I don't know if it's possible in Vimbre, but it is in Slither:

bc. 5 | o x x o x
4 | x x . o o
3 | o o . x x
2 | x x . o o
1 | o x o o x
. ---------
. a b c d e

Do also check out a simple Vimbre variant called Vimmy and a BGG thread about Kopano where the possibility and implications of zugzwang in that game are discussed.

Re: Why are ratings higher in Hex13 than Hex19? I think part of the answer is that "poor" hex players generally don't play Hex19, only Hex13. And since the rating gives your skill relative to the population playing the game, that means a person with the same skill in both games will have a higher rating in Hex13, since there he compares to a population which includes lots of "poor" players, whereas in Hex19 he's compared only to good and great players (and perhaps a few mediocre ones).

My Hex19 rating is much higher than Hex13 though...

Same here! Still only one of the mediocre players Marius mentioned!

Me too, although I think the only reason I'm above 1500 in both (just) is the wins I get via timeout. Which I guess must happen a bit more in Hex19 than Hex13

@Florian: Maybe I should try Slither as my next LG game. Suppose I am good at it, I could make a quick climb on the rating order ;-)

(To confirm: yes, I mixed up one title in my earlier comment; I agree Loose is not a connection game.) :)