Today’s Favorite Thing is not a favorite thing of mine but it is a beloved game that my husband, my boys and their friends all enjoy.  I’m not sure I can do it justice in this review since I know nothing about it but I’ll give it a shot.

The game is called Go and it’s a strategy game that originated in China for two players ages 5 and up. Despite its origins the name Go comes from its Japanese name which is how my Japan-obsessed kids learned about it.

Here’s a tiny excerpt from Wikipedia about it:

Go is played by two players alternately placing black and white stones on the vacant intersections of a line grid. The standard size of this grid is 19 × 19, although the rules of Go can be freely applied to any size: 13 × 13 and 9 × 9 are also popular choices for more simple and tactic-oriented games as well as a way to introduce Go to new players. The objective of the game is to control a larger part of the board than the opponent. To achieve this, players strive to place their stones in such a way that they cannot be captured, while mapping out territories that cannot be invaded by the opponent without being captured. A stone or a group of stones is captured and removed if it has no empty adjacent intersections, the result of being completely surrounded by stones of the opposing color.

Apparently Go is considered to be more intellectually challenging than Chess but there are only a few basic rules which makes it easy to learn. My 10 year old and 13 year old both enjoy playing and the competitions around here can be intense. Lucky for us, they have friends to compete with as well as a local Japanese club where they can join and play Go with other club members when they are a bit older.

So if you have a kid who loves strategy games like Chess, I really recommend Go. You can get the book and board we have very inexpensively to try it out and if you love it, you can invest in a better board called a Goban.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 5:00 am and is filed under Advent, Things I Love. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.