Alejo's Tenuki

There was a long topic recurrently appearing in Godiscussions: it would be great to save sgf files directly to the hard disk. Some users had tried it combining several tools, which made it a quite complex procedure for anyone but tech-savvy players.

Unless you’ve been living in another world, you’ll already have noticed the users migration from Godiscussions to Lifein19x19 with both administrators agreement. So the original GD discussion moved on to the new forum. By the way, I just happened to register in Lifein19x19 with the same nick: Alejo. The structure of the forum is very similar and the registration process is totally painless and just takes a minute.

On the Computer Go section, we can see this software announced:

From the video above, the result looks quite promising. Stone detection is very good and the program detects in-game board rotations. Though the video is quite limited and we can’t see all its features, adding a territory counter, while not very difficult, would be quite useful. On the other hand, the developer still hasn’t decided whether to release it freely or not, so we’ll have to wait for the final decision.

While writing the previous lines I’ve started wondering about possible software combinations for these tool. How would this affect the Go software market if this application was embedded in SmartGo or Moyo Go Studio?

When a player, currently enjoying their third or forth decade, is asked about a classic game from his childhood, there are high numbers that Monopoly, Risk or Clue come out among the first places. The time when these games were considered with high standards has long passed away. Today, I can’t imagine a gamer (i.e. a person who often plays games) trying to teach Risk or Monopoly to his son. It would be unbearable, it’s not just the amount of time it would require for both to be able to enjoy a game or the effort input to move a 8-years-old boy’s eyes from the videoconsole the slightly boring and dull board of Monopoly.

Being close to my thirties, I’m starting to see some couples around myself with newborn. Obviously, I’m not going to try teaching Go to someone younger than 3, he would certainly eat the stones!! But the minimum recommended age for “The Kids of Catan” are 4 years;  and I can tell you I’ve seen one enjoying it with just a hand. Hey, wait a second, Blokus can also be played with 5 years!! Though I lack experience on this game, I’m quite convinced both parents are children are equally matched on the board.

With 6 years, you can already make videoreviews on boardgames. If you don’t trust me, just check Games with Hayden. In fact, there is another family where both children, not aged the same, make videoreviews and comment on them, so you can understand their thoughts on the game.

Shortly afterwards, we find ourselves with the 8-10 frontier with great games which both adults and kids can enjoy at the same level… or not, I’m certain I would have been better at Ubongo than I’m right now. But here we have some educational gems and, in order to avoid making this post too long, I’ll comment on just a game.
“The Settlers of Catan”, hands-down one of the best gateway games:  resource management, a bit of strategy, commerce and negotiation, with some randomness played in just 60-90 minutes. Unless you haven’t been in Earth during the last 15 years, you’ll know what I talking about, if you don’t… then watch this reviews and buy it, the other option would be to buy it straight away, without watching the reviews. A complete must-have.
So current kids will find themselves playing The settlers of Catan, Carcassone, Ticket to Ride, Dominion or Bohnanza, when we used to play Monopoly (endless 4 hours games), and Risk (did I already say endless long hours?). Videogames can be left aside by the eye-catching Galaxy Trucker, Through the Desert, The Pillars of the Earth…

When this children become grown-ups, what do you think they will consider classic family board games?
My vote goes for The Settles of Catan as the first option…

Some of you may think of other games such as chess, checkers, pachisi… though this would need a whole new post to talk about them, I’ll try to sum it up into a couple of sentences. The first two – chess and checkers – require the kid to endure intensive training if they want to play on the same level as their parents and this is usually reached within the arrival of mature thinking during the second decade. Pachisi and domino are clearly beaten by other modern games when it comes to enjoyability and interaction for children below 10 years.

As you can see by the bottom of this post, a new button has been inserted. It’s the flattr button, and you’re going to start finding it all over the internet within the next few weeks/months… Flattr was already mentioned on my post about monetizing blog sites, as well as Scratchback – another irritatingly unsuccessful system on my blog which consisted on giving tips in exchange for links.

What is Flattr all about? You’d better watch this video.

Unfortunately, it’s still a closed beta, so you’ll have to apply for an invitation and it’ll be granted when the your time has arrived. It’s been a few weeks since I signed up, but I’ve heard they’ve sending lots of invitations lately, so it may not take that long for you.

This blog is already a few years old, it all started 3 years ago, January from 2007. Back then I was around 11k in KGS and, currently being 7k, I can’t say I’ve improved much during these years. This blog was started due to a Go hype I endured for the first couple of years, when I used to play at least once a week. Lately this tendency has been modified to somewhere like one game each… three months.

A side effect of this playing pace is the lack of games to review and the lack of interest in improving (reading, learning, watching pros…). So I focused my attention into Go software, which seemed to be quite an unknown field, since there weren’t reviews or comparisons available on the internet. For some reason, I considered it useful to have software reviewed and commented, users have shown me the opposite. There has been, if any, very little feedback, comments, suggestions or collaborations. Till recently, the reason for posting was the joy I obtained with doing so, added to the increase of visitors; it doesn’t appeal me any more.

Though the site will remain open to suggestions and collaborators, from now and on, I’ll post about whatever I enjoy, which will be mostly but not only: boardgames. Ultimately, the purpose of posting should be to enjoy doing so. And I’ve started by adding a “Recently played games” column on the right sidebar.

Enjoy

Day: April 18, 2010.
Hour: 15:00 GMT, 11 AM Eastern, 8 AM Pacific
Place: KGS server

What happens?? North America versus Europe.
Rules: ING rules, with time controls of 30 minutes main time + 10 moves/5 minutes Canadian-style overtime.

By now you should have already filled that day on your calendar with a “do not disturb, I’m at KGS” note. Or, at least, this is what the poll at Godiscussions points out, since a third of the participants haven’t voted for North America nor Europe, but for a KGS collapse.

Just in case you want to know the players for each team, check the American Go Association announcement.

Apple’s new device, Ipad, has already started to generate news involved with the go world. There are several users interested in buying this tablet, so I guess it would be interesting to do reviews of these pieces of software. Unfortunately, I’m not going to buy one, so guess we’ll have to get information from other sources.

Smartgo has already announced a version for the Ipad, available in the appstore for $19.99. According to Anders’ blog: “the two apps are still pretty close, but over time I expect them to diverge:

• The screen size of the iPad allows whole new features that will either be missing or limited on the iPhone.
• Even for shared functions, the UI will over time change away from the iPhone version and become optimized for the iPad.
• The extra power will allow more game records. Initially, SmartGo Kifu includes 20,000 pro games, but I hope to increase that significantly as soon as I know how the iPad performs.”

Unfortunately, having a different version for the iPad means that iPhone users will have to pay an extra license if they want to enjoy this version of Smartgo in their new tablet.
This is one screenshot from the emulator screenshots, where we can already see there are a few new options available:

As for server clients, Yetle at godiscussions.com has already taken a picture of the KGS client working through VNC in his iPad. William M. Shubert (KGS’ developer) has already stated that there will be a special edition available for Android tablets, avoiding to specify if there’s going to be an iPad version for this server. If we take into account the lack of a KGS client for iPhone, we can already assume iPad users won’t have a specific version on a short term.