Lox - An analogue of hex with captures. Your opinion.

A new game has recently appeared - Lox. It is not yet on boardgamegeek, but already implemented on abstractplay. It is a Hex game with captures. If someone has already played it, it would be interesting to hear their opinion about this game. Especially interesting is the opinion of high level players. I actually have three main questions.

1. How do you evaluate the potential of this game? Can it eventually become as popular as Hex?

2. Lox is a very non-local game. Do you think that simple templates similar to those in hex are possible in it?

3. Doesn't the first player have a decisive advantage regardless of his first move? I think due to non-locality even a move a1 will influence the whole board.

I wonder what 2000+ level players (if any) think.

I'm a very weak player of Hex, but I've played a couple of games of Lox.

The capture mechanic seemed quite innocuous, but it turned out to be incredibly drastic. As you've said, it's very non-local, so all the templates that we know no longer work, and it's very tricky to read the board state. There are a lot of fights because we always feel compelled to defend an attack, and the fight sequence can be quite long and tactical, forming huge blobs on the board, but it might just be the curse of being a beginner. "Influence" has a very direct consequence because of the line-of-sight mechanism, so especially on a bigger board, the "correct" moves are likely to take more of the global picture into consideration, although that's probably obvious.

Traditional ladders don't seem to appear because "ladder escapes" are all over the place, but fights often result in a long line of pieces running in one direction. I do think that some "templates" are possible, especially at the corners and maybe at the edges.

The problem with Lox is that player aids (visualisation of players' territory and highlighting threatened pieces) feel really important, although this seems to be true for Tumbleweed as well, yet it is able to thrive. I think the chaotic nature of the game might make it more approachable for beginners actually (if player aids are available), but it's still a very pure abstract.

In hex, many edge templates include one or two stones. I don't see how that templates could be organized in lox if both this stone and the free cells of the template are in the line of sight of distant stones.

Perhaps there should be more complex templates in the lox that include not only a group of cells and stones, but also line-of-sight information.

Yeah, the templates will have to include line-of-sight information. Maybe it wouldn't be correct to call them templates any more, but there's bound to be common patterns that can guarantee connectivity to a corner or an edge.