Life In 19x19

The big problem I see with these alternate geometries is that it's very difficult to visualize territory. Things which appear adjacent are not, and so I get the feeling that the game becomes more about capturing stones.

I'm more of a fan of keeping a cartesian grid(although polar coordinates might be interesting), but then changing the shape of the board, adding "terrain" etc...

I think, in fact, that you might be able to get people to use some of the strange geometries by adding them as features on an otherwise grid-like board. Then people can use them in interesting ways while still keeping the capacity to see the territory on the board.

I think it would be much easier to do in ascii:




Every dot is a playable point, Each has 3 liberties, except the edges, with 2 or 1. It's pretty easy to make boards of different sizes this way:


Bigger:


I can attach the python function I made to print these, it's about 5 lines of code. If someone's interested, I'd be up for a game