What is your favourite board game?

Thanks alex. Chess no doubt. But its one game to need to be constantly practicing to get its black belt. I know people with array of books on the matter. I just play for fun really

my nomination would be mousetrap, really is a kiss ass game.

my nomination would be mousetrap, really is a kiss ass game.

KICK ass?

Can't say it's my favorite [not sure I have one] but I recently played a lil Trivial Pursuit with my inlaws on a weekend away. And was curious as to if anyone played with some sort of alternative rules. I think there should exist some sort of rule that would allow opponenets the opportunity to answer questions posed to others if there was some sort of disagreement. I can't friggin count the number of questions others had that would/should have benefited my play. As I'm sure it existed on all sides. Needless to say I didn't win but the questions for pieces the winner had on occasion were way easy. I guess it's trivial ;) but just figured I'd state my case.

Cheers
-sore loser-

RISK and CHESS

How about Go?
And for the fun factor probably robo rally.

Chess.

ugh, i hate risk, 3 hours of gameplay jsut to have a dice decide your fate. i mean, who would want to invade australia anyway?

lol ;-)

Say what you want, I love my Aussieland.

How about Go?Yes, go! I've been playing for 40 years. I couldn't play much for a long time because Americans were losing interest and it was hard to find anyone to play. But the internet changed all that.

The handicap system makes it so much better than chess. You can play someone who is far stronger and get the advantage of learning from them, and still have a 50/50 chance of winning. Yet when you win everyone knows it's not because you're stronger than the opponent, it's because you've improved and it's time to reduce your handicap. As a result go is much more about teaching and learning and much less about competition.

Sure you can handicap a chess game by throwing away a knight or a rook or your queen, but then everything both players know about opening theory goes out the window.

I'll play chess if I'm desperate, and I was for many years, but my heart isn't in it.

It's interesting that Westerners started writing software to play chess about the same time that Asians started writing software to play go. Since then chess programs have become strong enough to beat all but the best players in the world, and even one of them lost one game to a computer. Go programs, on the other hand, are still well down in the novice ranks. Something about the basic nature of the game doesn't seem to yield readily to computerization.

It's interesting that Westerners started writing software to play chess about the same time that Asians started writing software to play go. Since then chess programs have become strong enough to beat all but the best players in the world, and even one of them lost one game to a computer. Go programs, on the other hand, are still well down in the novice ranks. Something about the basic nature of the game doesn't seem to yield readily to computerization.

I think a primary difference is Chess has a long recorded history. You can purchase an entire library of books that teach the strategy or allow you to replay the greatest games ever played. Chess can be broken down into three games, the opening, the middle game, and the end game. However, if you fall significantly behind in the opening against a good player, you may as well resign, the game is over.

Sets of encyclopedias cover the complexities of the opening game and it's relatively easy to program the standardized or book moves of thousands of different openings into a software program. Knowing or learning how to put yourself in a solid position to win will compensate for an opponent that doesn't make many mistakes. That is something the Chess programs are able to use to compensate for the AI's lack of imagination and creativity.

By 2003, over 35,000 volumes on chess in a variety of languages had been published, with approximately 14,000 English language works published from 1960 onward.

link (http://www.classicalgames.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=001450&Category_Code=1)

Ah well there is another problem with Go. It takes more computation time as especially in the early phases of the game you got far more possible moves (basically any onoccupied field) as compared to the limited movements in chess. And if one looks carefully, there are scores of literature out there for go, as well (only possible less in western countries).

However, I'm not aware of an encyclopedia of book moves in Go? Here is a list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_openings) of openings that are explained in the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings. These openings are programmed into Chess Software. Which enables the AI to play the first 15 or 20 moves without having to rely on the AI

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go) ;

The task is complicated due to the deceptively simple rules of the game. This makes the game easy to represent mathematically, but also allows for a huge number of legal moves.

They propose two ways: recognizing common configurations of stones and their positions and concentrating on local battles. "... Go programs are still lacking in both quality and quantity of knowledge." (Muller 151)

With Go software the AI relies on the AI much earlier.

You people are displaying your Eurocentrism. Go has been studied formally and written about for at least 1,500 years. The first decent chess book is less than five hundred years old. There have been go conservatories where children with a lot of promise go to live, like a monastery, for several centuries. There is nothing like that for chess players even today. Really strong players could make a living being full-time professional go players--teaching for money, playing in big-money tournaments, tutoring the aristocrats' children or their geishas (who were expected to be competent go players), being the faculty of those go conservatories, or simply playing for money like poker, back to at least the 17th century that I know of without looking it up. Today it's still very difficult to get by as a full-time professional chess master.

Books? BOOKS? My god, there must be a million go books and I'm only exaggerating slightly. Of course most of them are in Japanese. That was the only country where go was played seriously from the dawn of the second millennium C.E. until after WWII. A few people in the nearby countries managed to make it into the professional ranks but they had to become residents of Japan to take up that lifestyle.

Go is analyzed in excruciating detail, much more than chess. There is the opening in a corner. There is the opening phase of the game over the entire board and how the four corner formations interact with each other, and the myriad developments fall into two broad categories called "parallel" and "diagonal" that give rise to entirely different strategies. There is the endgame, something which I'm proud to say America has made great strides in. There are repetitive fights called "ko's" which require two out of three moves to be made somewhere else to avoid the game degenerating into a stalemate, and they are different from any other type of battle. There are games in which the players strive to surround the biggest territories and others in which they instead try to capture the opponent's stones. There are games that proceed with great discipline, settling the land in the corners first then expanding to the sides and finally resolving the center, and there are games that get crazy on the 25th move and explode into a huge fight in the center while one corner is still empty. And then there are handicap games, in which the handicap formations have been developed over the centuries and are strictly adhered to, and the variance in strategy to compensate for the point advantage on one side and the skill advantage on the other makes go about three different games depending on the number of handicap stones. The opening formations in the corners alone fill a library. There are dozens of them and each one can be ten to twenty moves long and have a hundred variations. Then there are the life-and-death fights, where there's only room for one group to make a "live" shape so each tries to kill the other. "Black to play and kill" problems are more abundant than chess problems. The tactical theory of these situations, which arise in most real games, is an entire course of study unto itself.

A master will write an entire book about one famous tournament game. We still study games that were played 300 years ago. There are more go columns in Japanese newspapers than chess columns in American newspapers, and there are certainly more go magazines than chess magazines.

I believe it was Sunzi (or Sun-Tzu in the archaic Wade-Giles transcription system) in "The Art of War" who drew many parallels between war and go, something like two thousand years ago.

The game has changed remarkably little since then, unlike chess which would be unrecognizable to a player from 2,000 years ago. The board was expanded from 17x17 to 19x19 about 500 years ago. Several new rules have been passed to handle rare exceptions, one of them during my lifetime. Go can never end in a draw because the person who plays second (White) gets a 5.5 or 6.5 point advantage in compensation, so one person will win by at least 1/2 point. In a handicap game no prisoners are given away at the start but Black (the weaker player) is awarded the win in event of a zero score, as a master-to-pupil courtesy for coming so close.

As for the complexity, yes go has more moves than chess, typically 200-250 per game instead of 50-80. (We count one move as a "move," not two.) And there are 361 intersections to play on instead of 64 squares. But on the other hand the possible moves are fewer. When it's your turn you may place one of your stones (they are all equal) on any unoccupied intersection that is not suicide. That's it. No knight's jump, bishop's diagonal move from one to seven squares, king's move in any direction but only one square, pawns with two choices but they capture diagonally. I suspect that the number of possible, legal moves at any one juncture is probably of the same order of magnitude on the average. Remember that the first move in go has 361 possibilites but the last one only has 100 or so.