Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. The game was invented in China...
Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day. A 2016 survey by the International Go Federation's 75 member nations found that there are over 46 million people worldwide who know how to play Go and over 20 million current players, the majority of whom live in East Asia.
The playing pieces are called stones. One player uses the white stones and the other, black. The players take turns placing the stones on the vacant intersections (points) of a board. Once placed on the board, stones may not be moved, but stones are removed from the board if the stone (or group of stones) is surrounded by opposing stones on all orthogonally-adjacent points, in which case the stone is captured. The game proceeds until neither player wishes to make another move. When a game concludes, the winner is determined by counting each player's surrounded territory along with captured stones and komi (points added to the score of the player with the white stones as compensation for playing second). Games may also be terminated by resignation.
The standard Go board has a 19×19 grid of lines, containing 361 points. Beginners often play on smaller 9×9 and 13×13 boards, and archaeological evidence shows that the game was played in earlier centuries on a board with a 17×17 grid. However, boards with a 19×19 grid had become standard by the time the game reached Korea in the 5th century CE and Japan in the 7th century CE.
Go was considered one of the four essential arts of the cultured aristocratic Chinese scholars in antiquity. The earliest written reference to the game is generally recognized as the historical annal Zuo Zhuan (c. 4th century BCE).
Despite its relatively simple rules, Go is extremely complex. Compared to chess, Go has both a larger board with more scope for play and longer games and, on average, many more alternatives to consider per move. The number of legal board positions in Go has been calculated to be approximately 2.1 × 10170, which is vastly greater than the number of atoms in the known, observable universe, estimated to be about 1 × 1080.
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SECTOR 41
Sector 41 is a board game published by David Long and Michael Lachtanski of Scimitar Games. The game became available for pre-order in February 2009 a...
Sector 41 is a board game published by David Long and Michael Lachtanski of Scimitar Games. The game became available for pre-order in February 2009 and was officially released in April 2009.
Sector 41 is a turn-based strategy game for two to four players. Game play takes place on a 9×9 grid of face-down tiles, randomly shuffled at the beginning of each game. Players control one mother ship which moves along the edge of the game board. Mother ships can deploy up to three explorer ships onto the face-down grid. Explorer ships are used to discover, mine, and tow deposits of Glynium to their mother ship. According to the game background, Glynium is an unstable power source only found in this sector. Victory is achieved when one player has mined more Glynium than any other player could match. In the case of a tie, the first person to reach that score is declared the victor.
Sector 41 was developed from a compilation of game concepts developed by David Long and Michael Lachtanski, the earliest of which go back to the mid-1990s. The name itself is an homage to the popular Area 51 science fiction theme. Play testing began in late 2007 and lasted until production began in late fall of 2008. The face-down tile set up was conceived of to emulate the fog of war mechanism, popular in many computer games. The developers also encourage players to strategically manipulate the board layout for offensive and defensive purposes through the process of "folding space". This game mechanism was inspired by the Dune novels.
The lengthy play time in the initial play testing lead developers to create the Guardian figure. The Guardian, described below, acts as a mechanism for rewarding exploration, expansion, and reduced play time dramatically. Additional rules for modifying the Guardian's role in gameplay are available on the Scimitar Games website. Michael Lachtanski designed the game's graphics. Many of the space graphics are based on images from NASA.
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