Sorry that was rather aggressive wasn't it? No insult was intended to anyone.

No worries man.  This is interesting and wish I hadn't of missed that when I was designing the board.

Actually restricting the first player's moves would be fairly easy to implement - I would set-up a territory that they only attack from on the first move (by giving it initial units but then not adding any more to it) and give it borders to selected territories.  From there play would happen off the "regular" attack from territory.

If you gave me a diagram of "acceptable" first moves (those for which it would not be advantageous to pie off of) I could make it happen at some point.

I was thinking of trying to make a different mechanism where the 2nd player would get a choice to pie or not on move 1 and then .  It would probably involve P1 having to take a non-move (where there only choice is to end turn) for their 2nd turn.  That sounds clunkier than what you are suggesting.

Amidon37 wrote:

I was thinking of trying to make a different mechanism where the 2nd player would get a choice to pie or not on move 1 and then .  It would probably involve P1 having to take a non-move (where there only choice is to end turn) for their 2nd turn.  That sounds clunkier than what you are suggesting.

This is pretty much what I was thinking.

I suppose I could try to make a list of first moves on 14x14 and 19x19 which do not give the first player a significant advantage. But for one thing, I have played very few 14x14 games and almost no 19x19 games. The games that I did play were all against significantly weaker opponents. So, all I could do is try to guess based on my experience on smaller grids.

For another thing, the whole point of the pie rule is that it is future proof. It isn't going to become obsolete as players discover better opening play over time. One might argue that such high level play is unlikely to happen here, but in that case why fix the current method in the first place?

I really hope you find a way to get the pie rule working. It doesn't matter if it involves a bit of clunkiness; just making a move and claiming a win are already clunky here. That's arguably part of the appeal of this implementation. As long as the choices the players face are functionally equivalent to Hex with the pie rule, that sounds excellent to me.