I really wanted a Go board. After spending all that time thinking through a shogi board and the pieces, I decided Go would be much easier to tackle.
Go is an ancient strategy game. It’s over 2500 years old and originated in ancient China. It’s believed to be the oldest board game that is still played today.
The goal is to take over as much territory on the board as possible by laying down stones where the lines intersect. The rules are simple enough, but the game is so complex. Needless to say, I’m terrible, but I love it.
Here is my board, made of medium draftboard. Rather than go with a hinged top, this time I wanted drawers to act as the bowls to hold the pieces, and to make it easier to clean up when I lose. The pieces are cut from white and black medium acrylic.
I did. I can’t say the clean edge was intentional though. I went throughabout 4 different versions of the sides before I came to what I wanted.
I needed the playing surface to be able to be cut in a Basic. But I also needed to make sure whatever size the board was, the pieces were not so small that it would be cumbersome to play.
I don’t like it when my game boards sag or feel unstable, so that’s the actual reason it turned out this way. I ended up making the playing surface a little smaller than I originally planned so that I could make it sit flush with the edges and the pieces would be able to sit nicely on that, but still feel stable enough to rest my hand on.
The drawers I made a face to glue on to make it even with the other edges, since the actual drawer space is thinner because of the double walls.
The innards look like this (Ignore the sloppy glue…I think I cleaned it up…):
@ellencadwell I like games that can sit nicely stacked on a shelf. So the box and drawers were so that I don’t have a game board and baggies of pieces floating around. Plus, it’s way easier to just brush all the pieces into a drawer after the game is finished.
I thought about it, but to be honest, after redoing the inner walls so many times, it slipped my mind. Another thing that slipped my mind, unlike a traditional board, mine is a square. Oh well, it works to play the game just fine.
I’ve never played on a smaller beginner’s board, but it should be easy enough to cover up the unused portions. Maybe a nice scrapbook paper or something with a square cut out…I need coffee…
I learned about Go on accident many years ago. My husband and I were sitting in a Korean sauna and playing board games. There was one that we were playing, the pieces were identical to Go (black and white stones), but the goal was to connect 5-so of course, my brain thought it was “Go” as in 5. So when I went to find the game to buy one for home, my search for Go yielded other results.
Turns out what we were playing was Gomoku, or Omok, same board and pieces, but different game.
Hmm…after I typed it all out, my post seems confusing… I guess what I meant to say is I was searching for the name and rules of gomoku, but I found the rules for Go instead.
Yeah, in all honesty, having a Japanese husband and a Korean mother makes my language skills quite messy. Can’t tell you how many times I’ll swap words without noticing. Plus the more Japanese I learned, the less Korean I remembered, so I’m equally bad in speaking all languages. Luckily my reading and writing isn’t affected…though my spelling in Korean is pretty bad…
I feel you. I studied Russian at DLI military language school. 4 years later, I got out, went back to college and majored in German. Went into the reserves while in college and was able to do my 2 week reserve training at DLI twice. Once for German and once for Russian. Kept throwing in words from the other’s language. Kept my teachers laughing.
