The shin kaya board and dark ash bowls from GoGameGuru have just arrived. Some observations about the kit are below. When I decide which stones to get and after receiving them, I'll get some pictures of both setups, and update this post.
The board:- Seller: GoGameGuru.com- Price: €175/$199 at the time of writing.
- Materials: I finally found out the difference between Alaskan Spruce and Alaskan Cedar through a description on the Aoyama site. The Spruce board is Shin Kaya, the Cedar board is Hiba. The board from GoGameGuru is Alaskan Spruce/Shin Kaya.
- Thickness: 6.1 cm
- Dimensions: 45cm front to back, 42cm left to right
- Weight: 4.85 kg. It's not 7 kg as GoGameGuru says. 4.85 kg is much more in line with the 4.2 to 5.2 kg I see on other sites.
- Color: It's blonde; not quite yellow. It's brighter than the beige/brown color of the 1.5cm beech board I have. It is very hard to describe. When putting the board right next to my color calibrated and profiled monitor (professional graphics/photography editing mointor, Eizo CS240), the closest matching color I can find when eye-balling images is this (obviously, I don't know how this is going to look on *your* monitor):
Attachment:
color.jpg [ 28.1 KiB | Viewed 4986 times ]
- Sound: The click from my size 31 glass stones is much deeper, softer and lower when the board is struck with the same force as the beech board. Comparison between the spruce and beech board would be: "dock..." vs. "Tack!"
- Construction: This one actually is a two-piece board, not a three-piece one like stated on the website. There is only one line in the middle that can be seen from the front sides. On the top, a line can only be seen if you specifically look for it, holding your head so that the light strikes the board in such a way as to highlight the line. In normal play it's not distracting.
- Regularity: Very good, with some minor points, as expected. As this is a natural source, perfectness is hard to come by, especially at this price.
The top is perfectly fine, with some lighter and darker color shadings. That's actually how I'd want it; I wouldn't want the board to be painted and be perfectly even. At about the D8 point, a bit to the right and down, there is some sort of wavy/wrinkly thingy the size of a grain of rice. That's just a pattern in the wood, and no damage or something. On the top right, two points left from the hoshi, 'something' can be felt. When touching the board lightly, it feels as if there's a hair about a centimeter long on the board, but nothing can be seen.
One of the sides has an irregularity in the form of a tiny hole the size of a pinprick. The bottom has two green small intergrown knots. So in short, the top of the board is very good to just short of perfect, and the rest has some small irregularities comparable or better to what Mr. Kuroki normally describes on most of the boards on his website. (Obviously, if the green intergrown knots had been on the top, the board would already have been on it's way back as defective.)
Workmanship: Very good. The top of the board has a matte finish, and as said, it's not painted. The sides have a finish in between matte and glossy; they feel as if they're lightly lacquered. The bottom is sanded matte. No line can be seen where the two pieces of the board are joined, except when specifically looking for it. The light has to strike the board just right to be able to see it. (edit: when I turn the board around, the line is easier to see on that side.) The grid on the board has thicker/wider lines than the one on my beech board, while the hoshi's are smaller. is 99,9% percent perfect. The top left hoshi is eeever so slightly oval (it's about half a milimeter wider than it's tall), and the center of the D10 hoshi is juuust offset half a milimeter to the right. If you're not specifically looking for problems as I have now, you'd never notice this. I don't consider the hoshi's to be problems.
Final verdict: I'm happy with the way it is. As I said, the board is made from a natural resource and probably partly by hand, and I don't expect it to be perfect. I'm happy with the way it is.
This board cost €175/$199. If the 3cm version of this board, or the cheaper 6cm version with the compressed wood core (so it uses less spruce and is thus cheaper) are comparable in regularity and workmanship, you'd save 35% to 50% of the price, and STILL have a nice board. I am of the opinion that this board (or the 3-4 piece Spruce boards found in other stores such as Hebsacker-Verlag, for about the same price) represents very good value for money. Getting something better comes down to getting a one piece version (+€75), getting a Hiba board (+10-15% over the price of a spruce board, mostly only found in Japan, and thus very expensive to ship and import), or moving up to a wood such as Kaya (+ infinite price; can be hundreds of dollars).
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