I have been a fan of the game of Go for more than a decade. It’s a game of strategy comparable to chess, played in China, Japan and Korea for thousands of years, but only recently more popular in the rest of the world.
While chess is all about the tactics of threatening and capturing pieces with different capabilities, Go is both simpler and more complex. The board is much larger, but the stones stay where they’re placed. Capturing stones is an important part of the game, but happens only occasionally; the main goal is to surround more territory than your opponent.
Unfortunately, my past attempts to get my family interested in playing have failed, and I never got very deep into online play. I was just good enough to frustrate my family, and mostly much worse than the dedicated online players.
When we moved to our new house, our board game collection moved out of the basement and into a place of honor on bookshelves in the living room. The big wooden board and the bowls of stones caught my kids’ attention, and at least for a little while they’re interested in learning. Just like that, I was sucked back into the game.
Now I haven’t played in a while and I can tell my skills are rusty, so I fired up the Go app on my phone. I can’t speak to the options for Android, but on iOS, SmartGo One is the best app I’ve found. It offers quite a few features for free, and while it’s pricey to upgrade (as far as phone apps go), it offers a massive archive of pro games and practice problems for all skill levels.
The SmartGo people have also incorporated their extensive library of interactive Go e-books from their Go Books app. This is a really nice resource, because good books on Go in English are still quite hard to find in physical bookstores, and these e-books are honestly more useful, because the problems and examples can be “played” directly in the book.
I don’t know if my kids’ interest in the game will last, but I’ll enjoy it while I can. My oldest has been studying chess and now outclasses all of us, so maybe I can foster his interest in another game where he’ll quickly exceed my skill level.
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