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Asian Origins Of Gaming Exhibited
thrashor writes "A major upcoming exhibit of the Asia Society in New York City explores the Asian origins of games - including many of the favorite board games in the English speaking world. The exhibition looks at how games have been as important as trade and religion in transmitting cultural ideas. Backgammon, dice games, chess, and of course (my favorite), Go/Weiqi/Baduk are explored, among many others." The exhibition preview mentions: "Illustrating the importance of games in early societies, mastery of weiqi was considered by Chinese people to be one of four essential cultural accomplishments along with music, calligraphy and painting."
Not completely off topic...
If you're looking for a competitive game of chess try www.freechess.org.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia
Southwest Asia
It can also be called the Middle East, although that term is occasionally used to also refer to countries in North Africa. Southwest Asia can be further divided into:
Anatolia, which includes the nation of Turkey
The island nation of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea.
The Levant or Near East, which includes Syria, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.
The Arabian peninsula, including Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Yemen and occasionally Kuwait.
The Caucasus region, including the nations of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia.
The Iranian Plateau, containing Iran and parts of other nations.
Also see Gulf States, for a different grouping involving several of the above countries.
A nice companion to the material in the exhibit might be the upcoming book from BradyGames, Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life . This book, coming out in September, examines not only the history, but also the reasons for the success of Japanese video games. I'll definitely be adding this one to my collection!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
With all due respect to Backgammon, Chess and Id, the best game I've ever played is Go. It's easy to learn but takes a lifetime to master. As well, it's deep enough to force a player to actual think all most all of the time. With it's handicap system, even beginners can offer masters a challenging game enjoyable to both.
;~)
American Go Association
http://www.usgo.org/index.asp
International Go Federation
http://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/igf/index.htm
The Interactive Way To Go
(excellent tutorial)
http://playgo.to/interactive/
Tips for Learning Go
http://go.kestrel.nu/
Interestingly enough, it remains the one game that cannot be won by brute force number crunching. Even an average player can beat the best Go programs. As such, I conisder it to be a useful tool in the search for meaningingful computing.
Go is a whole new challenge
http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/go.html\
If you don't Go, you'll never get anywhere!
Words to men, as air to birds.
Here's some links I collected for my Japanese 101 classmates:
Hanafuda Card Game (Windows)
Hanafuda plugin for Flowersol (multiplatform)
Go Trainer (Windows)
Go SGF Editors (multiplatform)
Online Go IGS Clients (multiplatform) Ask people for a teaching game after learning rules, practising
The Interactive Way to Go Easy to follow online tutorial (requires Java)
Go An introduction Outlines basic rules in easy to understand comic
American Go Association The info hub of American Go players
Shogi Variants (Windows) Japanese Chess, Shogi
Ricoh Shogi's Page Rules of Shogi (harder to learn rules than Go, IMHO)
Online Mahjong on Yahoo! Games Requires Yahoo! account, web-based
Rules of Mahjong this isn't the Shanghai Mahjong you know! Real Mahjong is like poker, not a tile matching game.
The do, in fact, play more Xiangqi than GO (or any other board game) in China. In China, Xiangqi is kinda like our checkers -- in that it is often the first strategic (i guess it is really tactical, but whatever) board game that children learn.
:)
In fact, i think i have read somewhere that Xiangqi is the most played board game in the world. But that is bound to happen to whatever is the most populare thing in China.