Anyone here knows copolymer by Mark Steere?

I have played quite some games of it on one other site, and it seems quite interesting (though not sure if great interesting), still I think I like it quite a bit, it has very simple rules and game play seems to be quite complicated, almost go like to me.

Wondered if anyone here knows it and what they think about? Well and also that it would be interesting to see it here :) If only to see what this great community would make of it.

I like the simplicity of Copolymer. Where did you play it online?

gamesbyemail dot com, but it is basically only usable to play with someone you know, as it seems to be getting rather little trafinc, I only get random oponent from waiting room after maybe 6 months wait. Though I play with my friend, about 40 games played in all.

Misreading the rules I thought about an other game:

“Define connection here as an adjacency between two neighboring cells. If you claim a cell which has two or more connections with enemy cells, you must claim at least one of these cells (replace it by one of yours) and continue until you play a move with only one connection.” Not sure on the ending rule, either once a player has no cells left or when the board is full.

What do you think? There should be many complete reverse fo lead.

Hard to say without thinking about it more. But it lacks the elegance of hex/havannah/copolymer, there there are no changes to placed stones. :)

@morphles, whilst elegance in an abstract boardgames is undoubtedly a quality to be striven for, I do wish people were clearer in their minds about what it actually *is*.    The received wisdom here and on BGG seems generally to be that it = simplicity, whereas in fact it's something much more like depth of gameplay / complexity of rules.

Sorry -  “boardgame” singular :)

Well saying that board game must have depth is obvious. so yeah, but in any case copolymer seems to have depth, well it seems so to me at least. In general depth of gameplay I'd say is not that hard to create, what is hard is have that depth without findly and obnoxious rules. Many comercial games have that (though sometimes it still works well imo, say dominion android net runner). Now abstracts tend to be rather simple. But sometimes gameplay is just tiresome, another mark steere game tanbo seems moderately interesting, but it seems to be paced very slowly, and is annoying to play. While copolymer seems less so.

@morphles, I agree with many of the individual thoughts in your latest post, but I'm not quite sure what point you're wanting to make overall.  Having said that, I don't know that I made myself very clear in the first place.  My main point wasn't that abstract games should have depth (though obviously they should) - it was that elegance in this field is a *relationship* between depth on the one hand and rule-complexity on the other.  Certainly I would have done better to explain that my forward slash meant “divided by”, rather than “or”. Two games of (let's assume) identical simplicity aren't necessarily equally elegant.  That will depend on what they respectively manage to deliver - and if my rough-and-ready equation is accepted as sound, the less simple game may still be the more elegant.

I understood your point, and agree with it. My point mainly was that copolymer for me has good dept/complexity ratio (well lets also say “game length/pace adjusted ration”),  while for example tanbo seems less so.

All in all for me hex and havannah are currently greatest games, hex is almost ultimate simplicty (to be fair imo copolymer rivals it there quite well), and has deep gaemplay. Havannah has more complicated rules, but imo the resulting game is so much more kick ass that I would almost say it is better than hex :) (havannah has timing [must be first to connect, not just make unbreakable chain], and also has alternative ways to preassure your opponent, from alt win conditions, ring threats and all that).

@Richard, beware of divide by zero exception!

A game of zero complexity may not have infinite elegance…

:)

On the face of it, it's a forerunner of Oust. It has a trademark protocol used in that game and in another example of simplicity and elegance: Flume.

I like Oust (hex version). The rules are a bit more complicated than Copolymer's, but the search space and branching factor are much larger for the same board size.

Xodd and Yodd are are very interesting connection games, speaking of elegance.

Yeah oust hex seems to be rather nice too.

But what interests me about copolymer, is that I seem to have no good idea about strategy there (and there is basically 0 material on that, while oust has some, some wiki iirc). Copolymer is very mysterious to me.