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.

I'm here with my GO board game wondering why everyone has a block of wood and pebbles......

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 think it's neat that it was supposedly the hardest board game to get AI to understand and play effectively.

Great game, much like chess I have no one in real life to play it with and I lose interest quickly in playing random internet strangers, so it’s been quite awhile since I’ve touched it.

I think a thing that made a huge impact for me was finding a program full of life and death puzzles. It really helped to drill in what a “dead group” looks like, and helped me judge when to abandon a part of the board or continue fighting for control there. Unfortunately that was 15 years ago and I no longer remember the name of that program.

Otherwise I always found the idea behind influence on the board to be very powerful, if difficult to define. I always noticed that good players tend to start by putting pieces all around the board, generally hovering on the third or fourth line away from the edge. Even if they wont fight for those spots later, just that small presence is enough to disrupt how their opponent will play and gives an edge in defending or attacking that area later. I’m a novice player who hasn’t played in a decade so maybe its not great advice, but spread out early! I think it really helps. It makes it a lot easier to claim territory and also just push into your opponents, and hopefully they eat up a lot of space trying to defend that.

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.

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.

#TableTopGames #GoGame #Gaming

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_of_Go

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.

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.

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.

Have you found the manga Hikaru no Go?

Why is that game named Five in Japanese if they have more than five pieces?

Gosh. Chess breaks my brain enough. I think I tried to tangle with Go for a bit after watching a doc about it but it was just too much for my feeble brain.