Lisa No Go

[D.B.]

You basically take it in turns placing counters on a grid. Whenever you manage to completely encircle a group of opposing counters they're removed from the game. It ends whenever you reach the point where neither played can place any more counters without them immediately being encircled and removed, at which point you count up the area of the board you control (be either having a counter on it, or encircling it so your oponenet couldn't go there). Person with the biggest area wins.

It's one of those games that's simple to learn but takes a lifetime to master. In fact, attempts to program a computer to play it, in much the same way they've created chess playing computers, have proved exceptionally more difficult than anyone expected.

[capadde]

I'm glad you all like it.

Yes, she's playing Go, and it's inspired by the anime "Hikaru No Go".
Go is fun, although it's quite hard to play and would take forever to master.

I've attached a small program where you play against the comp. I've once reached as far as to 8 Kyu*. Although I think that from that point, you'll need to get a lot better for every level.

*Kyu and Dan is the rating system in Go. You start at 25 Kyu and when you get better, you become 24 Kyu and so on.
When you reach 1 Kyu, you're very good. If you want to have an even higher ranking, you have to become a professional.
Becoming a professional is hard. You need to do good in a "Pro Qualification Tournament" in order to become one. When you do, your ranking changes to 1 Dan. And from there it only goes up.
The top players in the world are about 9 Dan, where the steps between each Dan is about as large as the step from 25 to 1 Kyu...

...

I think I got that right. Don't know why I wrote it all, since nobody asked...

[hadisia]

Like chess, Go is scary. I stick with checkers.

[capadde]

Chess is not scary. Chess is fun.

[SirMustapha]

Chess is like Radiohead. At first, you might find it too brainy and difficult, but once you're into it, it's just your average everyday fun.

But no, scary, no.

[djwhitaker2004]

That good, but if Lisa opponent is Bart, dang this could be a good game.