Go
A game for 2 players from great antiquity.
“Becoming one stone stronger is the supreme enjoyment.”
― Go Seigen, considered to be one of the best Go players of all time, in A Way of Play for the 21st Century (2008).
Introduction
I was first formally introduced to this game when I was living in Victoria, BC in the early 1990s.
Go is one of the world's oldest games, said to have originated in China some 2000-2500 years ago, and is widely considered one of the greatest abstract games of all time. It is still extremely popular all around the world, although much better known in Asia where it has a similar profile to what chess does in Europe and North America.
It was a game I played almost obsessively and virtually exclusively for a couple of years, and I feel it's long overdue that I wrote a review. Consider this more of an homage.
The Components
Like chess, Go can be played on a wide variety of boards. In general, the game is played on a 19x19 grid of lines, although common variants include a 9x9 board (used mostly for teaching the basics) and 13x13 (for shorter games). There's no reason you couldn't play on any sized board, but it bears remembering that the game tree at 19x19 is absolutely enormous. It's been said that there are more possible game combinations in a game of Go than there are atoms in a Go stone.
My personal set is 3" thick agathis wood board, with 10mm glass stones, and some lovely bowls a friend brought me from a trip in China.
My Go set
You can buy very inexpensive sets with plastic pieces and paper boards, and at the other end of the spectrum, the sky's the limit.
For the handy, my copy of has plans and instructions for building your own board.
Available for cheap at many used bookstores.
The internet is full of online shops where you can buy Go boards, bowls, and stones of varying quality. You can buy stones made of glass, jade, plastic, and many other materials, and in an assortment of colours. Boards can be simple affairs for the table, or be a table unto itself. Bowls can be the boxes the stones came in to exquisite rare woods. Even the assortment of images on this site will show the broad spectrum of available choices.
Game Play
Go is one of those games that has a very simple set of rules. One of the proverbs about Go is that it takes a few moments to learn, but a lifetime to master.
The Bare Bone Basics
Each player will get a set of stones, and the player playing black goes first, placing a stone on one of the intersections. 336
Players then alternate placing stones on the board and attempt to surround as much of the board area as they can. Stones once placed never move, and over the course of your board development, you'll be linking your stones together.
Stones can be captured if they're completely surrounded, in which case they're removed from the board and kept by the opponent. Captured stones count against you at the end of the game.
The game has three broad stages.
The opening involves staking out broad swathes of the board. There are some general openings (joseki), but there are so many potential combinations and permutations that even though these principles are solid guideposts, they're not necessarily definitive.
The middle game is about consolidation of your position, defending what you have, deciding what to fight for and what to abandon, and pressing your attack.
Go has a wonderful vocabulary around the game, including concepts that have become common in game design. Moves in Go are said to be sente or gote. The German word Zugzwang would be the closest Western word for sente - a move that compels your opponent to respond to what you've done. As long as you are making sente moves, you are setting the tone and pace of the game. If you make a gote move on the other hand, you are ceding the initiative to your opponent.
The endgame is largely about tidying up the board, closing off all the borders of unfinished territories, and getting to the point where both players pass to end the game.
The final score will vary depending on what rules system you're playing with. I'm sure it comes to no surprise to anyone that there are different conventions. The rules system I was taught, which is a fairly conventional one, says the final score is the total of the territory you've surrounded, minus the stones your opponent has captured, with the high score determining the winner.
Handicapping
Go has a ranking system to measures your relative level of skill to other players. It takes some number of plays to help figure out your own rating. 349