Little Golem

Little Golem, often abreviated LG, is a turn-based server maintained by Richard Malaschitz from Slovakia. It offers Hex on the sizes 11, 13, 15 and 19, and many of the top players are playing there.

In fact, the most prestigous title in the Hex world today may very well be the Champion title for size 13 at Little Golem. As of March 2023, it is currently held by lazyplayer. The size 19 champion is Arek Kulczycki, and the champion for sizes 11 and 15 is Daniel Sepczuk.

Other games available on Little Golem include Go, Chess, Twixt, Havannah, Reversi, Dvonn, Amazons, Golem's word game, Four in a row, Gomoku, Street Soccer and Dots and Boxes.

Tournaments

Tournament types

Little Golem offers several types of tournaments.

Championship

Participants are classified in leagues and play in round-robin tournaments of about nine players each. Depending on one's performance, one can be promoted or demoted for the next edition.

Little Golem Cup

Previously known as Monthly Cup. The winner of the month is determined in a number of round-robin tournaments. A first round group starts when five players have queued, or when the month ends. Each player can participate in as many first round groups as they like. The winners of the first rounds face each other in the second round. The tournament format allows for more than two rounds for a given month, but as of 2023, in recent years, participation has been too low for that. Since approximately 2016 (but they have also been retroactively created for previous years), there have been yearly finals for all monthly Cup winners of a given year.

INFINITY

An eternal ladder which works similar to a Swiss-system tournament.

User tournaments

Custom user created tournaments. Creating a user tournament requires membership.

Deciphering tournament identifiers

The identifiers roughly follow the format <board game>.<tournament type>.<game variant>.<tournament edition>.<round>.<group>, but it depends on the tournament type. The tournament types are ch, cv, mc, ld and ut. The game variants for hex are HEX11, DEFAULT (means board size 13), HEX15, HEX19. The precise formats for hex are

• hex.ch.<tournament edition>.<league>.<group> for size 13 championships,
• hex.cv.<game variant>.<tournament edition>.<league>.<group>, where <game variant> is not DEFAULT, for variant championships (excluding older size 19 ones),
• hex.<game variant>.mc.<year>.<month>.<round>.<group> and
• hex.<game variant>.mc.<year>.final for (Monthly) Cups (excluding older size 13 and size 19 ones),
• hex.ld.<game variant> for INFINITY (ladder) tournaments,
• ut.hex.<user tournament id>.<round>.<group> for user tournaments

plus the outdated formats

• hex19.ch.<tournament edition>.<league>.<group> for championships for size 19 until the 25th edition, before championships for sizes 11 and 15 were introduced in late 2021, and
• hex19.DEFAULT.mc.<year>.<month>.<round>.<group> for size 19 Monthly Cups from 2016 to 2020,
• hex.mc.<year>.<month>.<round>.<group> and
• hex19.mc.<year>.<month>.<round>.<group> for size 13 respectively size 19 Monthly Cups until 2015.
• hex.in.<game variant>.<round> as an older way to refer to INFINITY tournaments. Old links to infinity tournaments led to very large web pages.

Examples

• In hex.ch.54.3.2, hex.ch.54 stands for 54th hex championship, 3 stands for third league within that championship, and 2 stands for group 2 within that league. See Example championship for an illustration of what leagues and groups are. (Note that, misleadingly, this URL refers to a specific group of the championship, but what is shown is an overview for the whole 54th championship.)
• hex.DEFAULT.mc.2022.dec.1.6 stands for the sixth group of the first round of the December 2022 (Monthly) Cup. DEFAULT stands for the default board size, which is 13x13. (See Example monthly cup.)

The Forum

One distinctive feature of LG is the forum it provides. Many interesting discussion occur there, and actually HexWiki originates from the forum!

See also

For real-time Hex games, Board Game Arena is the most popular site.

External links

• The address is littlegolem.net.
• Ed Collins' great FAQ on Little Golem