If you're interested in learning the classical Asian game of Go, widely regarded as the pinnacle of elegant game design, the Portland (Oregon) Go Club is teaching beginners are local libraries:
Back at the turn of the century, the game of Go was dying out in Japan. A manga called Hikaru no Go managed to single-handedly rekindle interest in the game among the youth of Japan.
@nyrath I've got DVDs of the anime.
Movies where people play games usually get it deeply wrong. For example, the Go board in A Beautiful Mind makes no sense. Hikaru no Go did a clever thing: the games shown are historical games between experts.
@nyrath @peterdrake "The Queen's Gambit" brought in Kasparov and a couple of other chess masters to consult; then wrote some of their favorite games into the script.
@nyrath Go has a LONG history, of course. The oldest (partial) game record is from around 200 CE. Some famous games include the Ear-Reddening Game, the Blood-Vomiting Game, and the Atomic Bomb Game, which was interrupted (but not stopped!) by the bombing of Hiroshima.
In the scifi story Four In One by Damon Knight, the game of Go was used as a metaphor for interstellar conquest.
A similar metaphor was used in Time Piece by Joe Haldeman. Only he used the game Oware.
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/futuregames.php#galgo
@peterdrake @nyrath I’ll file this with the jarring feeling I get when watching actors miming the playing of musical instruments
@peterdrake
Isaac Asimov used that trick in his novel Pebble in the Sky. He wrote a scene where two players had a chess game.
Fans were marveling at how expert the game was. Until Asimov confessed it was copied from an ancient match between two grand masters.
https://takeinmind.com/asimovs-game/