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:

portlandgoclub.com/2024-intro-

@peterdrake

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.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikaru

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@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.

@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.

takeinmind.com/asimovs-game/

@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.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_

@peterdrake

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.

projectrho.com/public_html/roc

@peterdrake @nyrath I’ll file this with the jarring feeling I get when watching actors miming the playing of musical instruments

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