[jballanc]

I know that chess is probably the most traditional "thinking" game to play in the western world, but when I read this line:

> I think there may be a lot of neat similarities to chess and entrepreneurship, but ultimately chess is too controlled.

...I felt compelled to mention Go. In general, Go is much less constrained than Chess. The strategy plays on many axes: not only offense vs defense (as chess) but also territory guarding vs invasion, speed vs strength, and risk-taking vs conservative-waiting. In general, I would say Go has many more parallels with business (and life in general). I've recently been turning my passing interest in Go into a full-blown obsession, and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for an alternative to Chess.

[jaf12duke]

OP here. I love GO. For those that haven't played, it's the game showed briefly in a beautiful mind. Where Nash, the rational mind, can't figure out how he could have lost...and exclaims 'The game is flawed'

It's Othello squared. It's a fabulous game. It's intuitive, instead of rational. I lived in Japan for a year after college and played every year. It's hard to find people in the states that play and it takes a long time to play. The old saying goes, 'Two men sat down for a game of Go. That was yesterday'

If anyone plays Go and is in San Francisco, hit me up by email--would love to play!

[jballanc]

You might try checking out the Dragon Go Server: http://www.dragongoserver.net/

As opposed to the live-play servers, Dragon Go is intended for a much more measured pace of play (the FAQ claims the average player makes 4 moves per game per week). As an added bonus, there's also an iPhone app. It's definitely not the same as playing in person, but it's currently how I get my fix.

[khafra]

I feel the need to point out that it's still deterministic and fully observable; it's just that there's around 50 orders of magnitude more complexity to Go than to Chess; and to humans and the AIs we've created so far that's a qualitative rather than quantitative distinction.

[bdr]

Couldn't find your email address, so I filled out the form on your about.me...