Amid all of the cookies, honey-baked ham, honey-baked cookies and honey-baked bread of Christmas, I acquired a new skill. Or perhaps – a new deficiency of skill. My brother introduced me to the ancient Asian game of Go, also known as Weiqi and Baduk.
It's sort of like playing a really evil version of Othello that requires the use of more strategies and gambits than chess. You play either black or white, and the goal is to overwhelm and surround your opponents' stones while also claiming vast regions of a 19x19 board in the process. But I knew about Go. What I didn't know about are the vast resources that await the aspiring Mac Go player. There are standalone pieces of software, online communities, the works. Click through to join the fray.
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There are two basic pieces of software you should download if you want to become a Go novice. (And I do mean novice. For amateurs, you can be ranked as low as 50 Kyu all the way up 1 Kyu. Then there are strong amateurs, ranking from 1 Dan up to 9 Dan. Then you turn pro, ranking 1 Pro to 9 Pro. Having played for a week, I'm a marginal 25K, myself).
The first essential is Goban, a Mac OS X native Go client ported from a GNU program. The interface is pretty, and the AI is decent. It's capable of connecting to the Internet Go Server, but its greatest strength is its ability to be standalone offline. It's critical for surviving long airport layovers. It can also allegedly set up Rendezvous LAN Go matches, but I never got that to work.
The second is KGoban, the self-contained Java client for the Keseido Go Server. Here's where you can really learn your chops and play against competitors of equal strength, really brilliant and really dumb bots and generally play people all over the world, most of whom are way better than you.
And that's the lot. Enjoy your coming humiliation!
Thanks, Andrew.
