I've recently designed Rin, a new abstract strategy game. It's a territory themed game inspired by Go that involves simple rules and a subtle emphasis on the efficiency of moves.
You're most welcome to try out a reference implementation of Rin to get a feel of the game and let me know your thoughts. I'd appreciate any comments on the game strategies, suggestions of better wording of the rules, or pointers to games with similar mechanisms that I'm not aware of yet.
It looks very interesting and it is specially difficult to invent simple games. This one is.
For a go player the two stones per move thing is a bit disturbing because it changes everything we know about shape. (E.g., kosumi or bamboo joint can be cut.) Maybe you could make two variants, one with two moves and one with one. If the intention was to avoid advantage for black, I think komi works well enough. If the intention is making it difficult for computers (65280 starting moves!) tree width is not all. This game looks easier to evaluate than go because escaping to a side is easier than escaping + making two eyes, but it may have complicated semeais. And connection to "safe" may not be easy when semeais are present. None knows how hard it will be for computers until people have been implementing bots for years. (A million dollar prize would help ;-) if there is some millionaire in the audience.)
Here is a simple semeai example:
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Whoever plays next can fill the two gaps an get an advantage.
I guess go players would also prefer the fight being with only one stone per turn. This makes the fight more subtle.
I would definitely give it a try when it can be played online.
@Carroll: Thanks! It is indeed hard to capture stones in Rin, and I don't have a ladder example.
@erratic: Thanks! I had playtested a one-stone-per-move version before. It feels less dynamic than the current design, and it's extremely hard for me to pick a fair komi to reduce the first-player advantage. The 1-2-2 rule not only makes the game more balanced but also greatly increases the branching factor of the game tree, which will probably impose a big challenge to traditional heuristic search methods. I suppose Rin is easier to evaluate than Go -- its state space is apparently smaller than Go's. However, I don't think it's adequate to understand how to secure a group of stones, which turns out to be far easier than forming big rings while reducing the opponent's field of influence.
Little Golem