Experimenting with Visualizing the YINSH Board
In the game of Go, a 19 x 19 board can be broken up into three types of regions: Corners, Edges, and Center.
In a game of YINSH, I have always wondered how I would break up the board into something meaningful.
Currently, how I am seeing the YINSH board is four types of lines:
Time to bestow some names to these lines:
- Centerline (Red) - They are the lines that bisect the board.
- Highway (Green) - They are the longest lines on the board.
- Rails (Yellow) - These are the lines where many players form rows of their markers along the edges.
- Rims (Purple) - These are often used to prevent markers along the Rails from being flipped. Markers along the rims are unflippable.
All 85 points on the board are intersected by at least one of these lines.
Triangle Strategy
The advantage of the "Highway" is that it reaches a corner of the board that can pivot to a "Rail" (Yellow).
That's not what actually happened in the game.
Instead, the following is what happened, and it feels like it could be a "Joseki" (to borrow a term from Go), which refers to a standard sequence of moves, particularly in the corners. The only difference is that in Go, the result is considered balanced for both players. In this case, I think White only benefits.
So in this sequence, White has nothing to be afraid of and is able to reverse Black's sabotage quite easily.
Posted Aug 5, 2025, 6:05 PM UTC