Go!

Ed has been trying to get me to play Go with him for a while now, and I've been kind of resistant. It seems to just come up out of the blue at odd times, to the point that it's become sort of a looming topic somehow. Last night he brought it up again and I responded by imitating a meditative posture and pretending to begin to breathe calmly to deal with his desire to play.

This didn't go over so well. Apparently Ed has burned out some other girlfriends on Go, and so he has a bit of a sensitive spot about it. Well, shucks.

I think Mosch was the first person I played Go with. We got really into it, briefly, but had to abandon it because we just had too many other things we wanted to do. Since then, I'd basically completely forgotten how to play.

Go is a strategy game like checkers, othello, or hexes (whatever that game is called). You play stones at the intersection points of a board. You capture the opponent's stones when you cut off all of their escape routes (essentially), but you win by controlling territory with as few stones as possible. It's not hard to learn how to play Go, but it's one of those things where there is perhaps no limit as to how good you could become.

I agreed to play with Ed under the condition that he would not give me advice about what moves he would have made in my place. During the game we played (on 1/4 of the standard board, and with me having a 3-stone advantage to start), I did ask him for his thoughts on a few things as we went on. I lost pretty badly (as expected), but had some good moments. I'm definitely willing to do it some more.