Each Saturday, residents of Long Beach and Signal Hill gather under a shaded picnic table in Signal Hill Park and play the centuries-old game Go, otherwise known as Weichi or Weiqi.
One might mistake the game for a complicated match of checkers with its alternating black and white pieces. But Go dates farther back than checkers and even chess, first invented in China over 3,000 years ago, where it remains widely popular. It’s believed to be one of the oldest board games in the world.
“If chess is a game, Go is a war,” Signal Hill resident and Go player Paul Feldman said. “Every move has implications all over the place. There’s battles going on everywhere.”
The Long Beach Go Club–which has formally existed since 2013–recently moved its meetings from Tuesdays at Royal Cup Cafe to Saturdays at Signal Hill Park in an effort to attract new players.
On the morning of Saturday, Oct. 16, player Terry McIntyre and club founder Larry Holmgren were seated across from each other in a match. One by one in alternating turns, they placed black and white stones on the cross-sections of the board.
“What struck me was the simplicity and elegance of the rules,” said McIntyre, who first discovered Go decades ago while flipping through a games magazine. “It only takes about five minutes to teach a person the rules of the game, but then figuring out what the rules mean, their significance, you can spend a lifetime learning that.”
The strategy game relies on creating walls with the stones, sequestering opponents and cutting off territory. He who dominates the most space on the board wins.
Holmgren started playing Go in the ‘70s when he happened upon the book “How to Play Go” while looking for chess books. He made a DIY board using Santa Rosa Beach stones as game pieces. Like others in the club, he went on to play at different Chinese, Japanese and Korean Go clubs in Los Angeles in search of new opponents.
“You make points by making your territory bigger, growing, making the enemy territory smaller, reducing, cutting and killing and capturing your opponent’s groups or connecting your groups together to make them live,” Holmgren said as he looked intently at the board.
After calculating his next move, Holmgren carefully placed a black stone between the tip of his index and middle fingers, lifting his hand and sliding the stone into its place on the board.
“You can think of Go as a game of war, when armies trying to surround the other, kill them,” Holmgren said. “Or you can think of it as a game of harmony, where you’re making beautiful shapes and solving complex problems.”
Beyond the match itself, Holmgren said there are lessons to be learned from Go, which are encapsulated in proverbs.
“Don’t go fishing when your house is on fire,” Holmgren said. “Meaning urgent moves come before important moves.”
“Don’t be greedy, don’t be jealous,” he continued. “Greed does not win the game. Because when you’re greedy, you end up neglecting and ignoring your weak points.”
He noted that there are more possible iterations of the game than there are atoms in the universe, meaning players have plenty of opportunities to internalize the lessons of the game.
“It’s easy to learn and hard to play,” said Feldman, who picked up the game while attending college in Toronto. “There’s a great deal of negotiation, detente. In the earlier days you tend to be very combative, and then that opens up to little technical, scrappy fights. You have to learn to read the board.”
Members of the Long Beach Go Club are looking beyond Holmgren’s printout of “Ten Keys to Success in Go,” which he shares readily with newcomers.
On the back of the double-sided sheet of rules is bonus rule #12, “Don’t look at the player’s rank. Use the game to make friends.”
The Long Beach Go Club meets every Saturday at Signal Hill Park from 10:30 a.m. to around 3 p.m. No experience is required. Game boards and pieces are provided.