I’m here with my GO board game wondering why everyone has a block of wood and pebbles…
I used to play a lot in college. KGS was very popular and fun to hang around. Hikaru no Go anime is really good. Also there is a documentary about Lee Sedol vs Alphago games. Check them out. It’s best to play in person so check out local clubs and tournaments. r/baduk subreddit is fairly active.
As others have mentioned, there’s online-go.com for similar to lichess.org.
On Android there’s Gobandroid, but it requires this for play against AI: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.ligi.gobandroidhd.ai.gnugo/
On desktop there’s Sabaki:
https://sabaki.yichuanshen.de/Haven’t tried Sabaki yet, as I was using GoGUI running off GNU Go for a long time, but it’s no longer in development.
Also GNUGo on Linux.
There is an incredible book called The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata, a Nobel-winning Japanese author. It’s based on the true story of a master-level Go game that took six months.
I know that doesn’t sound very interesting, but trust me. It really is.
It is entirely unlike Go the programming language in that it is, in fact, a strategic board game, However, it may be possible to write a simple progam in ternary-encoded binary with the game pieces and board.
“but why would you use go? use rust, it’s blazingly fast and memory safe.”
I wanted to learn how to play after watching a few dozen episodes of Hikaru no Go, but it’s such an obtuse game. Chess I can understand, but Go has a level of strategy that my mind just can’t grasp.
That’s the great thing tho, the rules are very simple, anyone can pick up how to play. Then the strategy has so many layers that people can devote a lifetime of study to it, and it can become quite a psychological battle of wills between the two players in a way. But you can enjoy it right from the beginning without all that. And the handicap system means a game between players of very different skill can still be fun. Man I need to get back into playing go!
+1 for Hikaru no Go
Bought a Go set and brought to chess club; that went well lol
Read the Janice Kim books from her Learn to Play Go series and played some online
In the end stopped playing from lack of local players; now I play various other board games instead
Go / Wéiqí / Baduk is like the ocean, simple to understand near the shore, but unknowable and somewhat scary in it’s greatest depths.
Games on a 9x9 board are faster and may help during early learning.
Tsumego are small contained Go puzzles, where there is one ideal solution to be found. (Gobandroid or similar)
There is a massive amount of knowledge at this website:
https://senseis.xmp.net/?StartingPoints
(All available under the Open Content Licence)
It is a humbling game. I know nothing about Go.
These were the group at college with the collective smell playing Magic: The Gathering. I suppose mild autism, or what used to be called Aspergers. Never disliked them, but they were certainly different. I’m likely somewhere on the spectrum, and not just because “it’s a spectrum”, but it didn’t quite manifest like that for me.
I used to play MTG and can confirm the places I played almost always had that stale sweat smell.
You know, I always associated dirty, smelly degenerates with magic until I started playing - (I validated that by being the dirty smelly degenerate 😉) it was interesting finding out that potentially due to the high cost of the decks, a good part of the playerbase actually really had their shit together. We’re talking engineers, pediatricians, lawyers etc. who could afford to throw $500 down on cardboard. Enough folks were married that my wife started calling the place “husband daycare”
Of course the smelly smell still made an appearance, I was able to determine if a particular person was in the local game store (LGS) by smell alone, the moment I walked into the store.
Are you saying they were oddballs who happened to play magic, or oddballs because they played magic?
I’m not sure how it could flow from the cards to the people, but I suppose they are magic. And there was usually a gathering. So anything is possible.
Why is that game named Five in Japanese if they have more than five pieces?
it is the number of people to ever have won the game
Newbies are often afraid or insulted to use “handicap” pieces, but the few free pieces given to a lower-rank player are actually quite effective at adjusting the balance with unevenly ranked players. It’s not a huge advantage and doesn’t fundamentally change the play of the game.
Using different sizes of board is also neat. I’m very fond of a short game using only a 9x9 board. Plays a lot faster, but trades strategy for a more tactical game.
I personally don’t like the experience of playing with more than 3-4 handicap stones. For the weaker player, every move it’s like “What is my opponent up to now? I am still ahead, I should just play safe.” and for the stronger player it’s like “How can I force my opponent to make mistakes?”. These thoughts are sometimes part of an even game but not as frequently.
letsgooo
I think it’s neat that it was supposedly the hardest board game to get AI to understand and play effectively.
It wasn’t until 2015 that the top Go player lost to an Ai while chess lost in 1997. It’s wild how big that gap is when you think about how much tech had to improve to make it possible.
And didn’t people still find holes in the Go AI’s algorithm and proceed to dunk on it afterward?
Iirc someone figured out that if you didn’t make it obvious that you were encircling the AI, it wouldn’t take any preventative measures.
This is actually more impressive about AI. People used to think Go AI wouldn’t be able to beat a human player until like 2050. I certainly thought that when I learned it in like 2010. Back then the strongest AI was like 1 Dan (amateur) at most. (9 Dan is the highest rank and professional 9 Dan which you need to play professional games to get to are much stronger than an amateur 9 Dan which is like 9 Dan from an online website. Also the games rankings go from 30 kyu which is the lowest rank to 1 kyu which is the highest “amateur ranking”. After 1 kyu is the Dan ranks ranging from 1 to 9)
What app should I download (on Android) if I want to try Go? There are a lot of them, and I have no idea where most of the playerbase is.
I used to use gobandroid off f-droid, but these days I use crazystone: I like its ai for casual play (and I usually only play casual!). It does seem to have a deep love for talking home with no explanation when it starts up though, so on Lineage I just disable its internet permission.
Online-go is good but I haven’t really gotten into playing against strangers on the internet: I feel I should take it more seriously when I’m against a real person!
Wish I had people offline to play with sometimes though.
I was hoping someone would comment on this actually. Every android app I’ve tried has been riddled with ads to the point of being impossible to play.
If someone has a good one PLEASE let us both know!
Yes please! This was the obstacle that kept me from trying it a couple of weeks ago. Ideally I’d love to find the equivalent to chess.com (or lichess), but for Go.
Maybe one day I’ll get fed up and make one myself
Just adding a reply here to direct you to my other comment, which summarizes some of the options.
https://kbin.social/m/comicstrips@lemmy.world/t/791813/-/comment/4808661
Thanks!
Lose your first several games quickly.
My main opponent right now is my boyfriend (who is also learning the game with me). Nothing we’ve done has been particularly quick in any sense.
Have you found the manga Hikaru no Go?
I haven’t found the manga but it was made into an Anime that’s on Hulu right now. I was thinking of watching it when I’m bored some day.
