[jawslouis]

Thanks for the comments! I appreciate the thought put into it.

1. My original thinking was to keep the game simple for casual players. But now I see that there are many who want to get into more depth :) Will work on it to make the rules of the game clearer and give an option for more visual indicators.

For now, here are some explanations (which might beg more questions):

influence - at the end of each turn, the average color of a tile's neighbors is calculated, and the tile gets 30% of that color (retaining 70% of its original color)

threshold - once a tile gets 50% of the way to max-blue or max-green, it gets a dark border and is not selectable. 0% is white.

2. I originally thought about square tiles, but then it would be more complicated to figure out the 'influence' on diagonally adjacent tiles. Hex tiles eliminates that issue.

3. There is a strong 1st mover advantage in this game. To compensate, the 1st green tile is actually at 55% color. I tried to balance the game so that hard AIs on both colors would roughly capture equal number of tiles.

Glad you're enjoying the game!

[pmontra]

It would be useful to know how many shades of a color there are in the game. It can be known by observing the board for a few games but from your description there are probably 100 of them, or an infinite number (infinite as in a Float.) This makes it hard to read ahead and know for example if an invasion can survive. Maybe it's a game that's inherently easier for an AI than for a person. Not a problem with that.

A few notes.

1. I won twice 30-20 against Easy blue AI and tied against Medium blue by playing goish tactics (start at 3-4 from corners, knights moves, keep blue hexes separate.)

2. The UI lets me move before the colors on the board fully update. Maybe it's my phone that's slow, maybe it's an async implementation.

3. The game is quite fast because there seems to be little to think about. Of course I played only three games, if I played 100 of them I might start to notice patterns and foresee them even if I might still be unable to read the exact values. Even more so after 100 games.

4. Hexes are OK.

5. The overall first impression is good with that undeterministic feeling which in my case is also a bit too much unsatisfactory.

[nathannecro]

Been playing go for a while now and this is the first I've heard of goish tactics. What exactly does goish mean?

[ALittleLight]

It's playing in the corners, knight's moves, shape, connections, playing towards the edges, life and death, liberties, etc. As if you tried to map go tactics to this game.

I tried that too at first but didn't do very well against the hard AI. (Easy seems pretty random and easy to beat with anything). It took me a while to realize you need to throw out Go and find the tactics inherent to this game. I've found success counting adjacent colors and making moves so that I maximize the opponent's exposure to my color. The other thing to think about is what stuff you will automatically capture without needing a move. Some moves are completely unnecessary.

[wurstfinger]

I assume they mean Go-ish; i.e. tactics that that work in the game of Go.

[thomasahle]

> influence - at the end of each turn, the average color of a tile's neighbors is calculated, and the tile gets 30% of that color

Ah, so there's a temporal aspect! That makes it very different from go and any other board game I know.

I guess it only works on a computer, since everything is changing every turn, and not just the local area of your last stone.

I wonder if humans are able to grog it, or it becomes too complex to predict anything. Very cool!

[starmftronajoll]

I appreciated the rules as you wrote them. The important thing is to get started and see how it works. Thank you for keeping it simple.