Go Roadmap: Why It Comes Last

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title: "Go Roadmap: Why It Comes Last"
description: "The question we get most often is about the go roadmap, and it usually arrives in one line: when is go coming."
tags: ["roadmap", "comes", "last"]

canonical_url: https://yiboardgame.com/blog/go-roadmap

The question we get most often is about the go roadmap, and it usually arrives in one line: when is go coming. The short answer is that go sits last in our build order, behind gomoku, xiangqi and reversi.

Where go sits in the build order. Four games, in this order: gomoku, which has shipped; xiangqi, in progress; reversi, planned; go, last. Popularity did not decide that.

What makes go the hard one. - Scoring: Chinese area counting and Japanese territory counting can disagree, and players can also disagree at the end about which groups are dead

• Ko: a position can repeat, so the referee has to track board history instead of only the current grid
• Dead stones: the game ends and life and death still has to be settled. A person taps a group and says it is dead.

What carries over from gomoku. - The referee kernel: move validation, game state, time control

• The rating and dan-grade system
• Game share links and the replay viewer
• The board rendering layer, with a larger grid and star points

The go development plan, in order. - Step one: a 9x9 board with the full rule set and Chinese area scoring. The smallest board, so the rules get proven first

• Step two: 13x13, then 19x19, on the same engine
• Step three: dead stone resolution.

The part worth keeping: We are not putting a month on it. Full write-up is on the source blog.