The black player is always referred to with male personal pronouns and the white player is always referred to with female personal pronouns.

The use of gender-specific pronouns contributes greatly to the clarity of text describing gameplay that could easily become very confusing:

Black takes the ko with 23. Now White may not capture Black 23 immediately, so she plays somewhere else with 24. Black responds at 25.

Go is a three-thousand year-old board game originating in China. It’s deceptively simple. Each player takes turns placing small stones on the intersections of a grid, trying to either surround enemy stones or enclose territory. The rules can be taught in a half-hour or so. Like chess, one can spend a lifetime studying the game.

I’m a little surprised the game isn’t more popular here in the states. We Americans do tend to like land-acquisition games (football, Monopoly, etc.). Perhaps a holdover from the whole manifest destiny thing.

I downloaded a free Go program for OS X called Goban. Despite the fact that computers don’t play Go nearly as well as they play chess, the program has been kicking my ass pretty consistently.

Once I get my game back, I’ll be looking for challengers. Any takers?