[Spoon-business] Political Go (revised)

[Rob Speer <rspeer@xxxxxxx>]

[[ Fully described what "adjacent" means; made some wording more
specific, seeing how people are enjoying misinterpreting rules around
now; changed the rule about moving when an Ally has just moved to only
prevent placing a Stone, not forming or breaking an alliance. ]]

I change the text of my proposal "Political Go" to be:

__Political Go__
{{
A. The Game

There exists a Subgame called Political Go.

The game is played on a 13x13 board, which is initially empty. At any
given time, every position on the board is either empty, or occupied by
a Stone belonging to a certain player. The rows of the game board are
numbered 1 through 13 from bottom to top, and the columns are labeled A
through M from left to right.

Each player has a Go Score, which is a quantity of Go Points (possibly
negative), which begins at 0. A player's Go Score may only be changed as
defined in this rule. Go Score is a quantity independent from the
"Score" and "Points" referred to elsewhere in the ruleset.
 
Players may place Go Stones on the board in accordance with the rules of
this subgame. To "place" a Go Stone means to create a Go Stone in a
certain position on the board. Go Stones do not exist when they are not
on the board.

B. Alliances

For the purposes of this rule, a Player is either a Player as defined in
the rest of the Nomic, or the Admin.

Every Player has a set of Allies, who are other Players.

Anyone who is not an Ally to a given player is considered an Opponent of
that player.

Alliances are not necessarily transitive. Player A can be allied with
player B, and player B with player C, while player A remains an opponent
of player C.

C. Moving

A Move consists of doing one of the following:
1. Placing a Stone on the board on an empty space.
2. Forming or breaking an Alliance with another Player.
3. Passing.

Note that despite the name "Moving", Go Stones may not move to another
location on the board once they have been placed.

After any Move, some pieces may be Captured (as defined below).

To form an Alliance, both players must publically consent to do so. (The
first player consenting does not count as a move; the second player
consents by actually forming the Alliance, which counts as a move.) The
two players then add each other to their list of Allies.

Anyone in an Alliance with another player can break the Alliance at any
time. In that case, the two players remove each other from their list of
Allies.

A player may move at most once per Checking Period, and may not place a
Stone if one of eir Allies has made the most recent move.

D. Capturing

Two positions on the board are considered adjacent to each other if
their row or column, but not both, differs by 1. In other words,
"adjacent" is taken to mean "horizontally or vertically adjacent", and
diagonal adjacence does not count.

A set of positions is considered adjacent if there is a path made of
adjacent positions in that set from any position in the set to any other.

When the following rules refer to Stones being adjacent, it means the
same thing as the positions of those stones being adjacent.

A Dragon is a set of adjacent Stones that belong to players who are all
Allied with each other, and that are not adjacent to any other stones
belonging to a mutual ally of those players. [[This ensures that all
Dragons are of maximal size.]] If alliances are not transitive, it is
possible for a stone to be part of more than one Dragon. [[For example,
if A is allied with B and B is allied with C, then in the formation
AAABBCCC, the B stones are in both the AB dragon and the BC dragon.]]

A Liberty is an empty position adjacent to a Dragon (possibly on the
interior of it). If a Dragon has no Liberties, then it is Captured.

In the event of a Dragon being Captured, the players having Stones
directly adjacent to that Dragon are considered the Capturers. The
Capturers collectively receive one Go Point per stone Captured, as
follows: as many of these Go Points as possible are divided equally
among the Capturers, and the remaining Go Points are given to the
Capturers with the most stones adjacent to the Dragon, with ties going
to the player who played most recently. Each player whose Stones are
being Captured loses one Go Point for each stone that e loses.

Once a Dragon has been Captured, all the Stones in it are removed from
the board, and therefore cease to exist.

You may not play a piece in a position where it would be immediately
Captured.
 

E. Ko

Two states of the board are considered "equivalent" if the only
difference between them is that, at any number of given positions, a
stone belonging to one player is replaced by a stone belonging to
another, and those two players are allied. Only the positions of pieces
on the board, not the state of alliances, are considered

A player may not make a move that involves placing a Go Stone, if that
move would change the board position so that it is equivalent to a
previous board position.
 
[[This is the political extension of Go's Ko rule. It really does apply
to any previous board position, but since the total number of stones on
the board tends to increase, it is generally not necessary to look back
more than 2 or 4 moves.]]

F. Ending the game

The game ends during a Checkpoint when the most recent move was to Pass,
and nobody has placed a stone for more than an Nweek.

G. Scoring

A Territory is a set of adjacent empty board positions, none of which
are adjacent to any other empty positions. [[Again, this makes sure that
Territories are maximal.]] Any player who has a stone adjacent to a
Territory at the end of the game is considered to own a share of that
Territory.
 
For each Territory, each player adjacent to that Territory receives a
number of Go Points equal to 2*M/N, rounded down, where M is the number
of positions in that Territory, and N is the number of players with
stones directly adjacent to the Territory.

After the Go Points are totaled, any player with a positive number of Go
Points receives that many actual Nomic points.

The Go game is then reset; the Board is cleared of stones, all Alliances
are broken, and all players' Go Scores return to 0.

H. Displaying the Game

When a player makes a Move, he does so by posting a message to a Public
Forum describing the move and displaying the state of the game in an
agreed-upon format. Such a message may look like the contents of the
following comment.

[[
I place a stone at G3.

    A B C D E F G H I J K L M
  .---------------------------. 
13| . . . . . . . . . . . . . |13
12| . . . . . . . b . . . . . |12
11| . . . . . . . . . . . . . |11
10| . . . . . . . . . . . . . |10
 9| . . . . . . . . . b . . . |9
 8| . . . . . . . . . . . b . |8
 7| S . . . . . . . . . . . . |7
 6| . . . R . . . . . . . . . |6
 5| . . . . . S . . . . . . . |5
 4| . . . . . . . . . . . . . |4
 3| . . . . . . R . . . . . . |3
 2| . . . . . . . . . . . . . |2
 1| . . . . . . R . . . . . . |1
  '---------------------------'
    A B C D E F G H I J K L M

[R] Rob                  0 points   Allies: S
[b] Bob the Voting Fish  0 points   Allies: none
[S] Someone Else         0 points   Allies: R
]]

If a Move as posted is illegal, then it is not considered to occur. If
the state of the game displayed in the message does not accurately
reflect the result of making that Move - for example, because the board
does not reflect another Move made just before that - then the Move is
illegal.
}}
 
-- 
Rob Speer

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