We have made a channel #go on our IRC network to organize Go games and talk about Go stuff, please join!I'm sure that most of you have at least heard of this awesome game called
Go sometime. Go is a pretty old board game (like thousands of years old) and it is highly strategic and fun to play. What makes it so awesome is how simple the game really is (you can learn the rules in 5 minutes), but how much depth there's involved (you will improve even after decades of playing!) It's a game where you constantly see yourself improving while it still always remains challenging to keep you interested.
Like I already said, the rules are very simple, but instead of cluttering this topic I'll just link you to the wikipedia article because it has illustrations and examples of the rules:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_GoIt's a bit long article but in the nutshell the rules are very simple. The idea of the game is to make territory for yourself. This is achieved by playing 'stones' on intersections on the board, trying to surround as much area with your own stones as possible (walls count as well, so you don't need to play right next to wall to surround area). Whoever has more territory at the end of the game wins. There are a lot of tactics and strategy involved in this, and the only way to learn the most efficient ways of playing is to actually play to game, because Go is really a game that can only be learned by playing. Here's a couple of pictures of how the game looks like:
This is called the opening game, basically this is the first part of the game where you usually play big moves all around the board instead of focusing on a single local area on the board.
This is called the middle game. Middle game is when the big opening moves have been played, and the players focus more on different local areas on the board, trying to take as many points as possible at various locations on the board. This is the part of the game when concepts such as
Life and death come to play (which is very essential part of the game).
Finally we have the end game. End game is when there are no more big moves that could for example threaten to kill a big group of stones or so. Basically in the end game the players just try to take the biggest remaining points on the board.
There's no clear distinction when one phase ends and one starts, these are just general concepts really!
Hopefully you got some sort of an idea of the game by now, don't worry if you don't understand something, this is really a game that you must play to learn it.
To read more about the game, check the
main article in wikipedia, as well as
this page for beginners. You can also try solving various life & death problems at
http://www.goproblems.com.
The purpose of this topic is to hopefully get new people interested in playing the game, because just like any other game playing with your friends is always double the fun! The other purpose is to get to know who already plays this game, and how strong they are. Right now the only people who I know that regularly play Go from GW is myself and DS. We play on a
http://www.gokgs.com/ server. You can try playing Go there without registering or downloading anything! The easiest way to ask someone to play is to do so on IRC. Hopefully we'll see you on
#gamingw! If you don't use IRC, you can read the
IRC Master Post for info about how to connect to our IRC server.
I'm gonna keep a list of players who I know play regularly, and their strengths (which might not be up-to-date always especially because people tend to improve very fast at first). Ranks start from 30k after which it goes up to 1k, after which they go from 1d to 9d. Meaning that 30k is the weakest and 9d is the strongest.
GW Go Playersramirez (6 kyu)
DragonSlayer (11 kyu)
Gaming World Forums
Play Go with us!