La Vie Austienne: ‘Go’ at Austin Java

Sunday night after Laur. came back from her day at work we were both a bit anxious to get out of the house. My friend The Social Bobcat had given me a ‘Go’ game as a groomsman gift (schweet) and so we decided to give it a, uh, go, at Austin Java on Barton Springs.

Go is one of those ancient games of farthest asia that always seems to attract nerdy computer guys faster than rumours that Jun Kunasagi (if you do any googling for her, it’s probably not going to be safe for work) is washing a car in the parking lot.

sound of a thousand be-Teva’d feet running to the door

The set is very nice, but the instructions left a bit to be desired. The sublime zen nature of Go and the sublime zen nature of engrish left us not entirely sure if we were playing right. The essence of the rules was discerned, but we couldn’t be entirely sure we were doing it right, or seeing the subtelty.

Nevertheless we played, trying to remember rules and then realizing that our relatively glacial rate of play had whiled away the hours to bedtime so we declared the game played and went back home.