I'd say general overall strategy is to try to create "bubbles". You want to surround areas with your stones rather than filling them in.
On the small board, it's pretty hard to go wrong with just making a line of solidly connected stones (make sure the colored line shows up between them) between two edges of the board. This might not let you win against the bot, but will at least help you claim territory. Then once you have figured out how to do that, you can start to think about making moves that block the bot from surrounding area, or reduce the amount of area available to it, etc.
One of the guys on the discord is a strong traditional Go player and was playing a lot of teaching games with people yesterday. If you're interested in learning you could ping on the discord and I'm sure he or someone else would be down to help you out: https://discord.gg/4ren7UAFeb
The bigger board sizes definitely feel different to me, but I haven't played enough games yet to really know for sure. I'm interested in watching the meta develop. Maybe it will turn out that there really is a dominant strategy and the game is not as deep as Go, but I don't think I've seen enough to start thinking that yet.
The discord is pretty active and people discuss strategy a lot if you're interested. Regardless, thanks for playing! https://discord.gg/4ren7UAFeb
Hope that helps!
For the naming, I would think the game needs a bigger following before I can drop the "Go" or otherwise shorten the name. Not sure the SEO situation would be very good with just "Voronoi" right now :)
One issue is that I think I made the small board too small. This makes it very easy for a monolithic group to dominate. The bot prefers to open right in the center, and I've generally found that to be strong.
I _think_ that playing on the big board gives some more variety to the strategy, but I haven't finished enough games yet to be sure. Playing really connected though seems to still be hard to beat. If players continue to get stronger and play big board games it will be interesting to see how the meta evolves.
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!
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.
The time control implemented currently is that you start with a base amount of time and get additional time for each move. I believe it’s referred to as Fischer time which makes me think it’s related to chess, but I’m unsure how prevalent it is in chess or go.
Agreed that 6 sided dice would not detract from the amount of strategy in the game. I think it could be cool to try a physical version of the game where you shuffle premade tiles and place them in the grid - maybe a fun game to teach kids probability :)
Based on a suggestion from a sister comment, I have also added a "Tutor" mode. When hovering over a square in tutor mode, it shows the probability of winning the game given that you a) select that square and b) continue to play optimally for the rest of the game. Both of these options are in the settings menu in the top right of the game.
Finally, I've added a little writeup to the bottom comparing the strengths of the two AI implementations. Enjoy!
https://www.csun.io/2024/06/08/probabilistic-tic-tac-toe.htm...
var neutralChances = Random.Range(1, MaxNeutralChances + 1);
square.GoodChances = Random.Range(MinGoodChances, 20 - neutralChances);
square.BadChances = 20 - (square.GoodChances + neutralChances);
I guess I didn't include ties in that little blurb I wrote up, but the real results of my 10k trials were around 5:1:11.5 (lose:tie:win) for the AI vs random actor.
Would love to see your AI when it's done! Please shoot me an email if you want. My email is in my profile / in the site footer.
Probabilities are mostly randomized during board generation but skewed in a way to make gameplay feel a bit better. There's a cap on the likelihood of the neutral event, and a bias towards the good event rather than a bad one.
His wife, Harriet Fell, was one of my Computer Science professors at Northeastern. I really regret that I never took the time to talk to her about Sheldon. It always crossed my mind but never seemed like the right time.
pretty random assortment side projects