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title: "Why Match Sharing Turns a Board Game Into a Calling Card"
description: "A gomoku game is fast enough to be social currency. Match links, full replays, zero barrier for viewers. How sharing and review loops work in YiBoard."
tags: ["gamedev", "boardgames", "community"]
canonical_url: https://yiboardgame.com/blog/share-gomoku-game-link
Gomoku has an advantage most board games lack: a game is fast, three minutes for a quick one, under ten for a long fight. That makes a match usable as social currency. You make a brilliant move, drop the game link in a group chat, and it beats a hundred words of description.
What a match link contains. Every match has its own link that opens a complete board replay: move order, both players' clocks, the result. The viewer needs no account, no download, just a browser. That matters because the lower the barrier, the more people share.
Three sharing scenarios.
- Show off a win. Your clever move is the evidence, the link is the proof.
- Ask for a review. Send a lost game to a stronger friend and ask where the mistake is. Text explanations fail where a link succeeds.
- Teaching. Send typical games to a beginner. More effective than ten verbal explanations.
Why review is the fastest way to improve. Pros spend more time reviewing than playing. During a game you decide on instinct, during review you see where instinct failed. Losing games especially, the same pattern of mistakes repeats, and one review catches it.
The review loop: send the lost game to yourself, look at it the next day, find three moves, the last one, the mid-game turning point, the opening misstep. Find those three and the game was not wasted.
The calling card effect. For people who play in groups, sharing builds a reputation: once people have seen your replay, they know your level, matchmaking gets fairer, and nobody suffers a completely one-sided game. A match really is a calling card.
