My favourite routine was making up imaginary RTS games: Call Centre Despot and Sim Pope being about the only two I can remember.

Also TF2 is supposed to be a max of 24 players but a lot of servers bump it up to 32, beyond that it becomes ridicul-arse (check the scoreboard on a full server with more than 24 slots, only the top 12 on both teams will be visible & any server with more than 24 players has the “increased_maxplayers” tag).

Just to big up myself, I play Go at work during breaks with some of the co-workers, it’s awesome & way more fun than chess. The lovely glass chess set we have sits unused gathering dust these days. Looks nice though.

As for the depth issue, I’d agree with Keiron on the limit of the human intellect issue. Both Chess and Go are easily deep enough to satisfy most human players, so it isn’t really an issue if Go is techically much “deeper”.

Where I’d say Go has the big advantage is the accessibility of strategy to the avergae player. I’ve played a fair amount of Chess, but my strategic skills are very limited, and most games end up being pretty much a tactical game of attrition, which gets dull after a few games. In Go, on the other hand, I’m easily able to think about strategic issues, making it a much more interesting game to play. In Go you still have the tactical fun (”If I go there then you’ll go there, and then I can go there, but then you can there”), but that’s mainly restricted to the mini-games when fighting over the life/death of groups on the edge. What makes Go great is that those fights are less signigicant, so you can mess up a move, lose one of those fights, but still win the game if you play well strategically. (Just realised I’ve just said the same as Adam T, sorry!)

Also Go has the great ability to play fun games between players of different abilities, using the very natural handicap system. Chess between players of different skill levels is almost inevitably just a humiliating annihilation of the weaker player, not that much fun for either of them. It’s a shame more computer games don’t have good handicaps, but I suppose it’s really hard to set one up which doesn’t ruin the game (I remember Warcraft 3’s: ouch, playing with lower hitpoints than normal made micro hard work!). Perhaps TF2 has the best solution: no handicap, but it somehow manages to make it great fun to play even if you’re a bit rubbish.

In summary, yay! Go! And yay for RPS doing board games! :)

@ John:

I think Jim did it first, and he certainly did it best in his Chess 2 back page for PC Gamer.

One of my favourites that, the John Heroicka! caption still makes me giggle.