Go club gathers to play ancient board game

Every summer since Jake Woollen was 8 years old, his family would vacation on an island off the coast of Maine. One of his neighbors on the island, a mathematician, wanted someone with whom to play a game called Go.

He taught the strategies to Woollen, now a 17-year-old senior at Bloomington South High School.

“I learned slowly over the course of three or four years,” he said. “Then one summer I sort of passed him up.”

Go is the oldest game known today, Woollen said. No one knows the date of its origin. However, the most common estimate is about 5,000 years ago, he said.

“It’s rumored that the Chinese emperor created the game for his son,” he said, “because the son was really stupid and he wanted to make him smarter.”

The Go Club has existed at IU on and off since the 1970’s, Woollen said. The person who began the club was the U.S. Go champion, he said.

Woollen took over the club three years ago after the leader before him moved away.

Because he won a tournament in Bloomington five years ago, Woollen said he was asked to co-facilitate the club with visiting scholar Zoran Rilak.

Go is played on a lined board with black and white stones. The player with the black pieces always starts, Woollen said.

The stones are placed on the intersections of lines and cannot be moved once they are positioned on the board. Each stone has up to four “breathing spaces,” points next to it connected by a line.

If the other player is able to fill those points, he said, the stone is captured.

“The goal is actually not to capture stones,” Woollen said. “You want points of territory – empty points you surround. It gets very strategically complicated.”

The club does not keep a roster, Woollen said. On weeks with the most participants, 11 or 12 people will show up, he said, and weeks with the least participation maybe four.

“When I took it over there were some days when it was just me,” he said.

Freshman Ethan Hamlyn said he saw a flyer for the club in his residence hall and had heard of the game before. The club met right after his last class and did not conflict with his schedule, he said, so he went to learn how to play.

“I’m an avid Manga reader,” he said. “I read about the game a long time ago and have always wanted to play.”

Graduate student Xin He said she does not know how to play and is trying to learn.

“I know some of the rules, but I don’t know how to catch a big territory,” she said. “I think this game is complicated – it needs some logical thinking. You have to try to go through this game from the whole picture.”

GO CLUB
WHEN 5 to 7 p.m. Fridays
WHERE Asian Culture Center