Some mornings in Cambridge MA I have the chance to play Go with the young woman of the house that I visit when I am here. Well not Go really, she is only six, so instead we play Gomoku, the open version of tic-tac-toe played on a Go board. In Gomoku one tries to place five of one’s own black or white stones in a line of five. Some surprising and beautiful patterns can arise in Gomoku, more linear than Go of course, which is the spatial strategy game par excellence, but more intimate as well. This gave us the idea for a new ‘game’ to play on the Go board.
We call the game Daisen from the first three letters of her name and three letters from my own name. There is at least some inspiration from the old Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse and also of playing duets on the piano where one person plays the white keys the other plays the black (yes, I have seen people do this, and it is easier to do when not drunk).
The rules are simple. One player plays white, the other black. Each player takes a turn placing a stone on the intersections of the grid (as is normal with games played on a Go board). No conversation is allowed, Daisen is to be played in silence, or with some friends improvising music in the background. The idea is to work together to create an image.
The first game of Daisen near its end.
There are several strategies. In our first game we riffed off each other playing beside each other’s’ stone. There was a real feeling of give and take here, but also a pushing as each player tried to guide the emerging pattern.
Our second game was quite different.
Here we played away from each other, only gradually making an approach. We both knew, I think, that we were working towards an impression of a dragon. This is not surprising. The year of the dragon was approaching (it is here now) and my partner is closely related to the famous dragon trainer Ysiad.
One can imagine other strategies. Each player could play in a quarter of the board, developing patterns independently until they began to infiltrate the other. Or one could play in much more repetitive patterns, stitching across the board together a is the case with some of the common Joseki. There may even be Joseki for Daisen, though I have no idea yet what these might be.
Could one build sequences of Ko in Daisen? Would the result be a living and changing board, some simple version of the Game of Life? Could the Game of Life be played as a game of Daisen? I don’t know, but Ysiad may.
One can learn more about the Game of Life on Wolfram Alpha.
