One of my favorite pastimes is playing Go, an ancient game of strategy popular in Asia. Since I enjoy working with timber, too, it soon occurred to me that I should make a Goban, the board on which Go is played, on my own.
My first board was made from MDF with the lines engraved manually and filled with some lacquer.
The evolution in line-drawing took me to making lines with a felt-tip pen. This actually worked out quite nicely.
My latest boards were made from costly maple. So I decided to take a more professional approach and delegate the job of drawing the lines to a screen printer. The printer needed some template to prepare the screen. So I started Corel Draw and created the template by hand. As I’ve already been at it, I made templates for sizes I actually did not need (for 9×9 and 13×13 boards). I made these templates publically available. Two weeks ago I received note that there was an error in the template for the 13×13-board. So I decided to write a script that would produce the templates dynamically and automatically.
In came server-side scripting (PHP) and vector graphics (SVG) which combine quite nicely. The result of that hacking around can be found at Making Gobans – creating lines and hoshi. The php which generates the resulting SVG can be found as serverside_svg.phps.
The screen printer of your confidence will most likely be able to deal with SVG. Further information on displaying and post-processing SVG yourself can be found at Making Gobans – creating lines and hoshi.
I plan to provide the generated template in different formats, like png and gif, too.
More on making gobans can be found (in german) under Gobretter/Gobans selbst gemacht and (in english) under Making Your Own Equipment. I also found some pages that have clips on how gobans are made: Shaping the board and drawing the lines. Œé”ÕŽt�ëŽR‚Ì�¢ŠE is also a nice page and since I took the image that decorates this entry from them, definitely worth visiting.
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Wonderful post, I’ve been wanting to make a goban as well. I love Go. From a human point of view it’s a perfect game. I use to be a big Chess player from my earlier years till college.. probably played 15+ years, and became *somewhat good* to be modest. But when in college as a computer science major I took a games logic class (actually a philosphy coarse) and during it we discussed go both from a logic point of view and logical point view. I was hooked.Now I play it almost daily, have joined the local club, and as a computer science person have joined the computer-go mailing list and have spent the last year researching it *just* to understand it better, and am in the process of writing my own go engine.
Go isn’t just a game, just like many chess people say. But Go is much deeper. I would say almost on a religious point of view. While I don’t mean that to play to a Go god, I submissively mean both represent ideals in life.
Life is about understanding, territorry, dominance and submissiveness. To do well in life is to understand your “territory” dominate it well and that is done via understanding.
Go is a wonderful pass-time.
Anyway post is long, great post, and do you have any of your goban’s up for sale? I for one would be honored to buy one.
-Josh
jshriver @ gmail.com
Hi Joshua,
thanks for sharing your insights on the game of Go with us. I appreciate that very much.
You are right, one can learn a lot about the real life and people playing Go. I always find it very interesting how the different traits of people manifest themselves on the board. The anxious and the bold, the progressives and the conservatives, and so on. Go has a lot of psychology in it.
Most interesting is the need to find ‘harmony’ with your opponent on the board. If you’re too aggressive, you’ll loose it. If you are playing too secure, you’ll loose it.
So Go is also about learning to know yourself and maybe change for the better.
I don’t have boards for sale anymore. I sold some made of plywood some years ago. Those were made to finance the screen-printing of the two boards I made from maple.
They are all gone now…
A summary of my Go-related software can be found at Software to get Go going – I am currently thinking about re-writing Jacoto in Python. Jacoto was written in Java some years ago – I have learned much in terms of software-development since then and think I could no longer stand the old code – and that language. So a re-write is necessary…
I haven’t tried myself on a Go-engine, though. I would be interested in the progress of your project…
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