Hi Bonobo,

The magnetic hinge is very nice and clever. A nice portable board.

Do you happen to know the exact dimensions of the grid lines.
That is, from A1 to T1, and from A1 to A19, in mm.
Also, are they squares or rectangles ( based on the Japanese design ) ?
The website shows the veneer dimensions of 455 x 420 x 13 mm,
which gives me hope that they are rectangles.

Thanks.

If you take a closer look at the pictures (can be enlarged), I think you can see they are rectangles.
Else, just ask the seller. It is a very friendly shop.

Last year, I bought a full size portable go board which I think is just what you are looking for.
I bought it second hand (old?) using Buyee to bid on Yahoo Japan auction. It is very sturdy, very good to take outside, to a bar, coffee shop, the park or other.
Yes, it is folding, but the surface is completely flat laid open, no hinges in sight and no gap. It is made of very hard wood too, good for outdoor/travel, and 2 cm thick, solid. As it was second hand, it was not expensive.
If Kuroki is not able to deliver, you might want to use Yahoo/Buyee (but be careful what to bid for).

I agree that there are not Right Aswers, but 8 to 9 is good for portable set.

I like glass paste: a good feeling and nice looking at a reasonable cost.

Another nice and very traditional option are the Yunzi stones: the secret chinese formula!
You can find some good reviews of Yellow Mountains sets with wooden bowls.

KurokiGoishi is the first choice coming to equipment, but IMHO the importation from Japan can be costy, especially for a travel set. This is my "always with me" bamboo set with size 9 glass stones from Hebsacker Verlag
The goban is foldable and the central line is not traced: you have a near perfect optic illusion just from the small gap of the joining of the 2 folding parts

Enjoy!

_________________
When you play Weiqi you are joining millions of people across four thousand years of time.
Jonathan Hop - So You Want to Play Go?

oh, I totally forgot about my other folding board... if you live in a town with a large enough Korean population, you might find an H-Mart store (kinda like our K-Mart -- assuming US)

They carry a very inexpensive and very portable folding board and stones. $10 for the board and $10 for the stones.

Its not a full size board, but its not too small and still quite playable. I think the stones are 18mm (about the size of a good, large magnetic set). A slightly larger size would still work, but the typical smaller 21mm may be too big.

I've founds the exact same set on the 6brothers site before, but I have trouble navigating in Korean.
(ha... found my previous post: viewtopic.php?f=19&t=3573&p=58696&hilit=6brothers#p58696 but my links are old and dead)

The board is thin, maybe 1/4 inch or 3/8, and all mdf. It does not lay completely flat. So it may not be pretty, but its functional, light weight and very portable.

At $20 a set, I've bought several and have given them away as gifts.

I have a very useful slotted board, 1" thick made of agathis wood, bought 35 years ago. Back then these boards could be bought at practically every go equipment vendor, Ishi Press (then) for example. Given that there seems to be a demand for these boards I'm surprised that they are not available, and I wonder why. Is it that the price would have to be too high now? I can't remember what I paid for it, probably something like $30.

I bought my first board from the Nihon Kiin while in Japan. It's a beautiful Agathis piece with 19x19 on one side and 13 x 13 on the other. With shipping and the favorable exchange rate, it should fit your budget.

http://item.rakuten.co.jp/nihonkiin/006a/

This looks like the same type of board I have. It is thick enough not to warp easily. It is somewhat expensive at about $85 plus shipping but, in my opinion, it is superior to the folding boards.

I don't know whether you have ever, for some reason had to move a game in progress. That's happened to me at home or at the club. If you have a folding board it adds one more risk of ruining the position. If you have a slotted board like the one linked in Erythen's post there is no danger of the board folding when you don't want it to.

Ed,I didn't, but I just measured it


The grid dimensions are 394×420 mm, which answers both questions.

I’ve played standard size stones on it w/o problems that I remember (other than those my opponents gave me ).

As much as I still love this board (it was my first own “real” board, i.e. not cardboard), one should know that, since this is beechwood veneer, its core is chipwood, therefore the inside edges that hold the magnet strip should NEVER get wet, otherwise the chipwood will swell up and ultimately the board will be broken.


<edit>

Also, I really like the board Erythen linked to:
If anybody knows a European vendor that offers this I’d be happy to learn about it.

</edit>

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Hi Bonobo,

Thanks. Yes, the Nihonkiin board does look nice in the photo.

I'm just going to chime in here to say that I've bough the above-mentioned product and am very pleased with the purchase.

I just happened to have seen a used Japanese slotted goban with glass stones on the US eBay for $60 (+ ~$15 s/h): http://www.ebay.com/itm/Japanese-GO-Game-Set-Wood-Board-with-Stones-Lacquered-Bowls-/181916914673?hash=item2a5b17d3f1:g:-GEAAOSwAYtWJQ56. Although the seller does not know what kind of wood it is, to my under-educated eye it appears to be Katsura (due to the appearance of transparent wash typical of lower-quality Katsura boards). It is a good thickness (30mm, or about 1-3/8 inches) and the seller reports it is in fairly good shape. The stones appear to be typical glass biconvex, ~8mm in height, and despite what the seller said in the listing title the bowls appear to be plastic.

Although I do not have a slotted board, I have often played on them, and find the experience to be not much different than playing on a "whole" table board (the same cannot be said of folding boards, of which I have a few). I will just echo what others have said that this is the preferred form for a portable go board, as slotted boards are typically thicker than folding boards, and by their nature lay much flatter.

Slotted Japanese go boards are not a frequent find on eBay, so I would normally just buy this set so as to have a higher quality portable option, but given the absurd number of boards I already "had to have" I would risk familial ridicule and rebuke if I "invested" in yet more go equipment (*sigh*).

Oh, I should also mention that this listing ends on Thursday, November 5th, at 12:23 EST; if you miss it (and it remains unsold) it will probably be listed again (the seller has done that before, as I recall from my eBay searches).

Good luck on finding the board of your dreams!

Schwartzseer

Yikes -- shipping to the west coast is over $50!

The wood is Agathis. This is the same type board I got from the Nihon Kiin.

It's too bad the shipping costs were so high or I might have picked another up. These are really nice boards for the price, great for clubs or casual play.

Somebody snapped up the set yesterday, so if it was a member of this website, congrats!

I was frankly surprised at the cost of shipping cited above (since when I put in my East Coast zip it calculated the cost to be less than $15) but sure enough, an Los Angeles zip yields a shipping cost of over $50! This is frankly bizarre given that it would be USPS priority shipping, and in my experience there is not a huge difference in USPS pricing for the lower 48 states. Sorry that you "left coasters" were discriminated against in this way!

Anyway, regarding Erythen's assertion that the wood was most likely Agathis--I thought the wood (and the translucent wash it sported) looked very similar to a folding Japanese 15mm Katsura wood board I own, and knowing that Japanese boards are much more likely to be Katsura than Agathis (as Agathis is favored much more by the Koreans) I assumed it would most likely be Katsura wood. Well if someone here *did* win the auction, it might be interesting to see if the label indicates the wood type

Yes, you can move a slotted board (and possibly a magnetic hinge board) without bothering to pay attention to how you pick it up. Moving a hinged board safely requires that you pay attention and pick it up with hands at opposite ends of the fold line. AFAIK, nobody is making a "locking" hinged board.

In my experience “without bothering to pay attention” is not true for magnetic hinge boards. It is possible to move such a board with a game on it (I’ve done it successfully), but it is quite difficult (I have also failed a few times).

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

That's why I said "possibly". Not having encountered one of these, no idea if they used magnets strong enough for that. If the magnets just strong enough to keep the board together when supported on a surface, no, would be as difficult and possibly even more difficult to move as a hinged board (as the hinged board is rigid in one direction). Note that magnetic boards with magnets strong enough to easily move the board might make it difficult to take the board apart.

Yes, I’m aware of that, that’s why I wanted to add my “experience” with such a board Then again, maybe it’s just that my hands are not as calm anymore as they once were …

Cordially, Tom

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?