Gameblog

Go and Gang of Three

As typical, we played Go. I played ten games, mostly pretty fast 13×13 which is the greatest fun in those surroundings. I won quite a few of them, too.

As our these days mandatory card game, we played Gang of Four. We played a six-round game with three players, and it was quite fun. Despite what some might say, the game works well with three. The switching of play direction is somewhat confusing and I might drop it from later plays. It’s more confusing than interesting.

Also, we didn’t quite figure out the values of the combinations. It isn’t really obvious from the rulebook, which leaves out some crucial information. Or no, it is there, but not explicitly stated. More detailed examples of combination ordering would be useful. I’ll definitely fix that with the Finnish rules.

I also picked up Kogge from Post office. It wasn’t a completely free review copy, but a fairly good deal anyway. The game looks home-made, but interesting. Unfortunately, the rules are a bit of a muddle. The game seems to be rather complicated, but it might be only the rules. I’ll try to work it out and see how the game plays. I’m interested, anyway, and it’s always fun whenever Finland is mentioned in a game (one of the cities in game is Turku).

Mikko

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3 responses to “Go and Gang of Three”

  1. Mikko, what sort of Go set do you use? I would like to explore Go as a beginner. I was in “Playin Games” in London this week looking at a set with a nice wooden board (2 sided), in two halves which join magnetically for play, nice glass stones, but the effect was spoiled by yukky plastic bowls for the stones. So I didn’t buy it….bought Zendo instead! Anyway, any tips for buying Go equipment?

  2. Well, that would’ve been better than my set. My first set was a tin-box set, with a cheap wooden board and tiny plastic pieces. No bowls, just ziploc bags for the stones.
    Then I upgraded to a fake leather boards — they look ok and can be rolled up. Easy to carry with me, as I play most of the games somewhere else than home. I’ve got proper glass stones now, with really ugly plastic containers. However, the containers can be closed tight, so they are also good for carrying around.
    So yuo had a pretty good set, there. You can’t get better bowls without a lot for wooden bowls, and I think the bowls are the most useless part. If you want to have good Go equipment, I think the stones are most critical — that’s what you’ll be handling and looking at most of the time.