Go-Go-Go: the game of Go without turns

Abstract

The study of variants of classic games has a long history, with chess alone inspiring countless variants that have been proposed, analyzed, and studied. The game of Go, despite rivaling chess in age, cultural relevance, popularity, and strategic depth, has seen drastically fewer variants. We introduce Go-Go-Go, a variant of the classic game of Go where there are no turns, and players play stones simultaneously and asynchronously on the board. The variant (which is to be played through a computer) includes a basic mechanism to avoid excessive spamming of moves, by imposing a minimal delay between moves that depends on their relative spatial distance. Apart from the lack of time discretization, most of the ruleset of the original game is either directly maintained or adapted in a natural way that preserves the original spirit. The first playtesting indicates that this results in the preservation of much of the emerging strategies and "flavor" of Go, while replacing the long strategic reasoning with fast paced, instinctive action fueled by quick reflexes. Play testers also report the need to balance immediate but suboptimal reactions with more reasoned but slower plays. We offer a publicly available, playable, OpenSource, and online reference implementation of Go-Go-Go at http://gogogo.di.unimi.it