Purpose of and rationale behind Go Markers U+2686 to U+2689

[Philippe Verdy]

2016-03-18 19:11 GMT+01:00 Garth Wallace <gwalla at gmail.com>:

> > The issues with line breaking (if you can use these combining around all
> > characters, inclusing spaces, can be solved using unbreakable characters.
>
> Line breaking isn't really a problem that I can see with the Quivira
> model. If they're given the usual line breaking properties for
> symbols, the Unicode line breaking algorithm would prevent a break
> between halves. East Asian vertical text is another story. In a font
> that just uses kerning to join halves (as Quivira does) you'd end up
> with the left half on top of the right in vertical text. I'm not sure
> how ligatures are handled in vertical text.
>

East Asian vertical presentation does not just stack the elements on top of
each other, very frequently they rotate them (including
Latin/Greek/Cyrillic letters) So this is not really a new complication.

The numbers however are used for noting or commenting a strategy, or the
placement order during a party.

However for game notations purpose, rotation plays a significant role
(notably if those two part symbols are joined in a circle or disc: it can
make the difference between several distinct sets of stones, or it could be
used in a 4-players go variant (where black vs. white is not sufficient to
distinguish the players). In reality the stones would have 4 colours
(stones are not really numbered,
they are all the same for the same player, or there's some special marked
type of stone for each player in addition to their normal set) or sets
would have some symbol or dot on top of them.

There are also go variants using stones that take a territory and block the
position but that cnanot be taken (both players can use them, but the
territory taken is not counted for any player.
These stones can also be placed randomly at start of the party over the
board to complicate the game, or there's a limited set of blocking stones
for each player that an choose when to play them instead of standard
stones. Those blocking stones are visually distinct, but identical for the
two players that have them at start of the party.

Although the classic rules of go are extremely simple, this game has a lot
of variants. In fact many players that don't know the exact classic rules
are inventing their own variant.
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