After 3 months of playing Hex, I decided to give Havannah a shot. Although there are many similarities between both games, such as local fights, shapes, edge templates etc., when playing in opening phase I feel totally lost. Due to the simple fact that edges are not related to players' colours, achieving game's objective seems utterly counterintuitive to me. Do you have any tips, basic opening principles, materials etc. that would give any "feeling" of the Havannah's opening? :)
Havannah definitely has opening principles and if you consider my rating, it has evolved somewhat beyond me. I'm not particularly well wired as a player, generally speaking, and (or rather 'because') I hate analysis. But the 'counterintuitive' feeling may be due to the fact that Havannah is actually a race game masquerading as a connection game. For a Hex player that is an unfamiliar situation.
I think the introduction of swap made the first move in the center unappealing, which is to say that if you could make the move without swap, it would be pretty nice. My personal guess is that playing the second move at J10 after the first move is near the side/corner might be too slow. But I'm not one of the top players.
It's funny to go back to my thread 3 years later, just after winning havannah championship :) What is even more funny is the fact, that I still feel lost in the fuseki :D
Little Golem