Go Review - A video 4,000 years in the making

[Music] oh golly i'm out of my depth welcome to a video in which a professional board game reviewer tries to come to some kind of a verdict on go two player abstract game and four thousand year old cultural institution a game so emblematic of human genius that when google's alphago ai defeated the world's best player kg in 2017 that moment felt like the age of ai sliding closed a manhole cover on top of human history as a species you and i had a good run but now it was time to roll over and wait to become that skull at the start of terminator 2. before we kick off we would like to thank onlinestormmastersofgames.com for lending us some of their go equipment for this video i am absolutely not thanking them for sending us this 500 pound table with grooves cut by an actual samurai sword or these 300 pound stones made from the traditional materials of clamshell and slate if masters of games were trying to make me feel uncomfortable they succeeded jokes on them though i kind of want to be uncomfortable now there are countless resources out there that will let you know why go is an explosively intelligent nuanced deep and rich game what i want to do is drop the f word i want to tell you is it fun to play is it fun to learn and if you are one of the growing number of people who enjoy exploring the designer board game scene i want to let you know if go is something you should be exploring as well and i don't want to tease my conclusion early but the answer is a resounding maybe game is is pretty great we gotta get rid of this stuff though let's see if masters of games sent me something more appropriate for people who have ever eaten a doritos perfect yeah this is more our speed don't you think so while the full game of go is played on a for evening 19 by 19 boards it's way better to start learning the game on a 9x9 board then graduate to a 13 by 13 board and you can probably get to grips with go without your brain slithering out of your ear like so much scrambled egg but whatever size aboard you play on the rules of go are always the same starting with an empty board both players take turns popping their black or white stones anywhere on the board trying to claim territory territory is defined by a line of your stones that enclose a segment of the board so here's what a board might look like at the end of a bizarrely peaceful small game of go both players then figure out their score by counting the empty spaces that they enclose but white gets an extra six and a half points to make up for the fact that black always goes first that's easy right an easy little game no go is never easy never think it's easy now pay attention while i teach you a whole other thing while players are going back and forth placing stones it's actually possible to earn points and improve your board state by taking your enemy's stones off the board as prisoners the orthogonal spaces around a stone are called liberties and if a stone's liberties are ever totally blocked by the other color that other player removes it from the board and each captured stone is an extra point for you at the end of the game however stones of the same color blocking one another's liberties actually share liberties and only once you've blocked all of these shared liberties do you sling the whole group off the board for a point bonanza what this means is that a lot of go is trying to link your stones up letting them sort of hold hands with one another to keep them all safe from your opponent for example if we look here this group of stones is absolutely doomed but if we just link them up even though they're surrounded they're like functionally immortal and let's go baby so now you know the two ways of getting points in go there's claiming territory and capturing stones and if we circle back to that first rule of capturing territory now you might have an answer as to why in an example like this where the white has carved out this 16 point territory here you wouldn't just go well just fill it with stones and take all of their points away the reason you wouldn't do that is because you are digging your own grave if you fill this up with stones look because this group you built have no liberties they're all going to get captured so now your opponent still has 16 points worth of territory plus 16 points worth of your stones and this is where go started to click for me because this is an exaggerated example right no player would ever play into this space it's obviously just doomed the question is would you still play into this space what about would you still play into this space or this space and this is the beauty of go about four hours into my playing it i started to see the board not as territory for me to go out and take but a dark forest full of snares that i had to avoid it's for this reason that games of go end only when both players pass back to back i don't play anymore i'll give you points i don't want to play anymore i would give you points and then you can score and forget our pristine example from earlier this is what an ordinary sloppy beginner level game of go is gonna look like now interestingly stones inside the other player's territory are automatically captured so to make counting your score easier you can pop capture stones that you've got into the other players territory to easily see the final score so that's nice and easy right no what did i just tell you go is never easy it is possible for groups of surrounded stones to remain on the board at the end of the game and be declared uncapturable if you manage to give them two eyes meaning two empty spaces because if they have one eye white can go here and then the liberties are gone and the stones are removed but if you give group two wise then they're uncapturable because if white plays an e or the two empty spaces it eliminates itself so at the end of the game the stones survive and that's it that's it that's basically it so congratulations are in order you now know how to play go past time of the intelligentsia for four millennia i think i have earned a healthy snack so what do you say you and i swapped from this crap thing to an intermediate board and i'll tell you a little bit about what go is like to play so listen i play a lot of board games which makes me quite hard to impress also i've never had a particularly fun time playing chess so i wasn't expecting to enjoy go almost at all right i was expecting this game to be tough and perfectly designed but also sort of lumbering in its pace and crepuscular in its genius like an opossum which is also black and white so that analogy works even better anyway turns out that analogy is absolute junk because this game is not lumbering it is not crepuscular it is exciting and it is tense it's also crunchy and spicy oh my god get these things away from me okay so in a word go is mind-blowing and by that i don't just mean it's awesome although it is what i mean by that is in order to get good at it especially when you play on a full-size board you have to open your mind you have to open the windows and let out all of your assumptions about how the game should be played and let in just the sheer scale of this i want to say battle but chess is a battle what go is is a landscape for example let's say you're at the start of the game and white starts muscling in on your territory as black now at that moment all of you both as a player of games and as an irrational human being is going to be drawn into this little corner of the board you're going to want to protect this board you're going to want to show those invaders what for you're going to want to capture them you're going to want to make a fool of them so you spend your next four turns wrapping around them like a big dorito eating snake genius and now those stones are yours but you'd be forgiven for being drawn into this corner of the board after all let's not forget that is the entire size of the game we were just playing but while you are being drawn into this battle your opponent will have been taking control of the landscape what did you take just there three or four moves let's see what white could achieve with three or four moves elsewhere they could absolutely lock in control of this corner they could grab the center of the board they could back up this wall and push into this fight and what that white player has done is when you go to take some other piece of territory now you've locked in this corner wherever you go you're going to be outnumbered and surrounded so unless you are you can expect to outplay your opponent from this point on you can expect to lose all those other battles which means you've lost the entire game we looked at a little card game called air land and c a while back which got incredible mileage out of just asking players to declare when they thought they had lost a round and there's a little bit of that in go except instead of the fights happening one after the other in go all those fights happen at the same time in this game in front of me we have this battle this battle this battle the battle for the center maybe in this big battle in the corner and you have to decide which you've already lost which you've definitely won and which out of the rest of them needs your help right now but in one of those moments where go displays jaw-dropping systemic beauty you have to understand or if you don't understand you will get punished these fights aren't actually separate because as they grow for example you have a fight i'm winning over here and a fight i'm losing over here but we're only ever just like a couple of stone placements away from these now becoming one big fight and worse and in continuing evidence that i just can't open my third eye big enough to get good at go i can say okay i'm winning this and losing this and then i can play accordingly but what i always forget is that if my stones get captured suddenly the flank on the fight i was losing is actually the thing that was keeping this fight safe oh no now i'm losing both fights oh boy but i'm getting genuinely moved as i struggle to explain just how beautiful this game is all this fighting you're doing is not the whole game remember the first thing i told you about go is it supposed to be a game about cutting off sections of the board and claiming territory but you've probably done what i always do when playing go which i get so drawn into fights and preventing my stones from being captured that i forget it's not even half of the game go is all of this capturing and fighting business in one layer then on top of that is this whole other layer which is carving and dividing territory to get points or to use an example from a game i played recently i worked so hard to come out on top in a particular fight i was a winner except no i wasn't because then my eyes sort of went in and out of focus and i realized that while i was fighting white had surrounded this territory so those stones are mine and myself were fighting tooth and nail not to be taken prisoner while already inside a prison when i describe go as a landscape it's because of this incredible sense of scale that the board has it always feels like it's able to contain all these different fights it can contain different territory it even can contain different emotional responses from different players i feel this is safe this is dangerous i don't like this i don't understand this and yet always despite having all these discrete elements the end of every game of go it always comes together in one final state although at a beginner level like mine games always do seem to come together like two lorries full of bad plans having a head-on collision on the highway to mediocrity although i will say that one of the things that never gripped me about chess is when i finished a game of chess and got my ass kicked i never felt like i learned anything with go i feel like i just get i take that one step closer to mastery with every game because mastery and go is actually while it's like a million miles in the distance it's up there like a mountaintop you can see it clearly all you have to do to be a go master is take all these discrete elements all the different fights all the different fights for territory all the emotions squish it all together in your open mind and realize it is one game it is one thing with one correct move but for those of you not convinced by my hyperberton i'll just say that while preparing for this review i got addicted to how go made me feel i'm used to board games making me feel as excited as go does i'm not used to games making me feel tested and rewarded learning go felt like i was back at school but a nice school where i don't feel near constant anxiety in fact while my friends who i was learning go with were busy i got myself a copy of silverstar go for the nintendo switch a decent enough bit of software that meant i could play go against an ai and go to a pretend go school where an imaginary woman gave me badly translated tips i had a couple of great afternoons watching a fantastic go youtuber called incente who has a great series for beginners i even watched some of the anime hikaru no go a classic series about a kid who gets haunted by a feudal japanese go master and of course i did play some go online as well even if i did use the chat window to tell my opponents i was nine years old to justify how badly i was playing anyway right now as i film this i am filled with a gentle sadness that after this video i have to give these nice boards and stones back because the moment you get away from those sort of sneeze-proof plastic starter sets go is a magnificent object just to be in the presence of of course it is the game has been around for 4 000 years they figured out the right size and shape and weight and material for everything reaching into these bowls feels like indecently good and while i thought go was super boring to look at initially the more i loved the game the more i realized that this is beautiful it's like staring down at this growing constellation of glinting possibilities ah you know what let's get out the expensive stuff again i promise i won't make a mess of it you know there's even a correct way to place these stones you reach into the bowl with your thumb and index finger you replace your middle finger the index finger you press the thumb with the middle finger uh where was i oh yeah this is the point in the review i would look for criticisms of go but candidly i don't have any that would be like looking for problems with a pearl the question isn't what's wrong with this pearl it's do you like pearls gold doesn't even have the problem that most two-player games with high skill ceilings do it doesn't have a problem that playing against someone who's way better than you just sucks because go actually has a really robust handicap system if your opponent is better than you you just start the game as black with a few stones on the board already and that's it if you still keep losing just add more black stones before the game starts and the game is still then perfectly tense for both players without feeling in any way reduced it still feels like go you know go on tell them to buy it oh my goodness you're one of those ancient go playing ghosts like in the anime yeah oh my god are we going to become friends like in the anime oh what do you mean what does ooh mean just i'm very busy yeah all right i didn't even ask you to do anything yet quinn oh jesus i am a ghost of commercial board games do not be so quick to abandon the news this is very poorly conceived what are you even the ghost of what died to make you what have you got money taped to your face you know what just i've got this so final thoughts on go if hearing me talk about this game excites you or if the idea of any game that's as deep as the mariana trench gets you hot under the collar i would say try go without hesitation the starter sets are cheap and even if you don't have anyone to play it with there are tons of free resources online that let you play against strangers and ai and the rub is in those two words strangers and ai right so what i mean is that my world the traditional hobbyist board game world is a hobby shared you know the board games that i'm used to have themes that are designed to get people excited or have twists and quirks in the design that make you want to whatsapp your friends and tell them about these games immediately and then the rule sets are designed to on-ramp people onto the experience as smoothly as possible go is so exciting but there's a metaphorical wall around it like it took me hours of googling funny little edge rules until i felt like i was playing it right it took me a week of playing games every evening until i felt i could finally call myself a beginner and so every step i took into this world i felt was taking me away from my friends and family i would have an amazing evening with go and i didn't even know how to express that to my friends without being a hellatious boy i mean look at this thing i told one friend of mine that i was having an amazing time with go recently and she asked i'll go i don't know anything about that but is it like checkers and i froze up because i didn't even know what to say [Music] and that's not a criticism of go it's it just causes this game to stand apart from the hobby and what i love about the hobby of board games which is making me feel closer to my friends go made me feel further apart from my friends i would need new friends i would need go friends in order to truly share this part of my hobby and that's not a problem but it is the thing that's making me feel okay about sending all of this stuff back oh that was a big old game wasn't it if you are just joining us shut up and sit down is currently in the iron grip of chess month a month where we review two player games only in order to do our bit for people around the world self-isolating if you've not yet caught some of the other pleasures of chess month do be sure to check out matt's review of ice team and also matt's review of ken so this is a lovely little family game that's better than it has any right to be and this something a little darker and a little richer for just two players take care everybody

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 435,595

Rating: 4.947566 out of 5

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Matt Lees, Tom Brewster

Id: RRBjN8empIs

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/aers_blue]

Oh great. SUSD reviewed Go. Now it's gonna be sold out everywhere for months.

[u/OceanBlue765]

Quinns kinda summarizes how I feel about "lifestyle" games in general. Anyone who has played a game in the tournament context or a competitive multiplayer game for a long time can relate to having to make new friends around your new hobby and how hard it is to explain to people with a passing interest what makes the depths worth plumbing.

One thing I thought was amusing though is that modern designer board games is similarly a lifestyle hobby. One of the most common questions on this subreddit is, "How do I get my friends to be interested in more strategic games," and the most common response is, "You might just have to find a dedicated board game group. Honestly, there's a mental context to a lot of mechanics and styles of playing that are hard to teach people who aren't engaged with the hobby because it's a different way of making connections between different ideas, not just a fact you recite.

Quinn's insight in this video into how board games are designed helped me organize my thoughts on why some lifestyle hobbies are easier to engage with than others. Some hobbies really are better at curating an experience for newer players that helps them feel that they're actually participating in a meaningful way. This is why I imagine it's so difficult to hook people into something like fighting games, where basically every interaction is a zero-sum transaction with your opponent. At least with board games, there are auxiliary puzzles I can engage in that lead me to having fun even if I'm getting totally stomped by my opponents. I imagine this is also why euro games are so popular.

[u/Squallbait]

As someone with a passing knowledge of how to play, this makes me really want to dive in.

But I'm afraid he hit the nail on the head in terms of needing to find a club or group, something I do not have luck in. There doesn't seem to be an active group within a 2 hour drive of where I live, even less groups than Chess near me.

And I'm afraid it'll be like chess for me, I get enthralled with the depth, beauty, and challenge of the game and learn all I can. I get family and friends to play with me since there is not a group nearby, but they quickly stop due to just having more than basic knowledge means I crush them. I try to teach what I know but they lack the enthusiasm for learning it like I do, and eventually they stop wanting to play. Then I try to play exclusively online, and it feels so impersonal, no different than playing a computer. I'm fine with some or even most games to be online but I really crave having a physical human across the board to play, even if just once or every other week. Sometimes I wonder if it's even having them physically there or just interaction about the game, online players seem to at most give a "GG" at game end or nothing at all.

Maybe I should just push through and play online only (go and/or chess!), but it's somewhat demoralizing to me to not have anyone to really enjoy the game with.

[u/radaar]

Quinns: They sent us a £500 table!

Me (an American): Wow, how does a table that small weigh so much??

(I immediately realized my error, and yes, I’m aware that I’m an Arrested Development punchline.)

[u/GoGabeGo]

Oh man. I enjoyed this one for many reasons.

I wanted to see how my beloved game would be portrayed in the board gaming world.

Also, anyone who has played likely got some good smiles at the random board states shown.

Anyway. Play Go. The game is amazing.

[u/VincitEgo]

I got into Go because of Hikaru no Go. Then I spent every day playing mutliple games per day for the next year and a half. I got decent, but I'm by no means an expert player. I got up to around 3 kyu online. (Ranks range from ~25 kyu for beginners to 1 kyu for strong intermediate players. Then go from 1 dan for the advanced ranks up to 9 dan. Fun fact, some martial arts of Asian origin get their ranking system from Go. The first rank of black belt is 1 dan and increases from there. Yes, there are mutliple ranks of black belts.)

I never would have gotten as "strong" as I did without the interest that a random strong player took in me. We played many teaching games with discussions of strategy during and after the game. Honestly, I probably would have flailed around forever in the beginner ranks without the kind generosity of that person I happened upon.

I don't play much anymore these days, just the occasional game. I sometimes log on and watch a high level or professional game though. I still enjoy the game immensely, it's just the wall between where I'm at and breaking into the advanced ranks is higher than the effort I'm currently wiling to invest. But that year and a half I spent fully immersed in Go remains a cherished memory. It's a beautiful game that gets more awe inspiring the more you learn.

[u/mvanvrancken]

As a Go player for 20 years on and off he's dead on that it's a kind of pursuit that will alienate you (at least with respect to this game) to your board-game-playing friends. So keep playing Gloomhaven, because you're going to still need it to keep your friends interested. I can see this being a fun diversion for an evening, but it's a whole night just to explain how to play. Rules as simple as Go's are means that a lot is left to heuristics, and you know how awful it can be to explain those...

This is a game you play when you really only want to play one board game a lot. That being said, come on over to r/baduk (that's the Korean name of the game) and peep around!

[u/pxan]

As someone who's been playing Go on and off for a little over a decade, I absolutely agree with everything said here. Go unfolds its complexity so wonderfully. The basic strategy of the game is equally understood by a 20k player, a 5k player, a 5d player, but the difference in play between a beginner and an expert is utterly staggering. It's a game that really does allow creativity and some of my favorite moments playing games have been on the Go board.

However! It really is a weirdly solitary game. I've tried over the years getting my friends and loved ones interested in the game, but no one else has really gotten further than "Yes, this is neat, I enjoy it!" The game really demands them to put in time on their own. So, yes, the actual solution, as Quinns hints at in his review, is to find a Go group. The game really shines in a social setting where everyone is as into Go as you are. But, you know, life happens. Clubs and groups come and go. I have great memories in old Go clubs where the members have all moved on.

So Go is simultaneously really easy to recommend and really hard to recommend. Still probably my favorite game of all time! If you're interested, I definitely think you should give it a shot!

[u/SMHeenan]

At some point, I need to sit down and tackle this game. It's been on my radar for... well... a long time. But it's always seemed like a game that needs to be taught by someone who can walk all over me, then explain why I got walked over and how to prevent that, just so they can walk over me in a different way, and so on until I manage to accidentally figure something out on my own.

It seems absolutely fascinating, but I just don't know where to even begin to find that person (or the time or the social setting given that Covid seems to have walled in most of the states and we're running out of spots to make an escape).