The game of Go - how Westerners would name it

[daal]

Live and let die.

[hailthorn011]

-Ponds
-Continental Drift
-What Cavemen Played
-Lines & Circles
-The Gentleman's War

Eh, those are just some that come to mind.

[Bonobo]

Hegemon?
Imperio?
Murder?
Bully?

[shapenaji]

Risk

[Mike Novack]

Not looking at the question correctly?

My answer is that if the game had developed in the West its name and terms (today) would be some corruption of the name of the game and terms used in the language of the people who developed the game. If 3000 years ago, even in the West that might not even be a language of the Indo-European language group as just arriving in Europe about then. Was it an Etruscan game? A Basque game? A gane of a people whose language we now know of only be the preservation of a few words that were terms of this game?

Why would you think the situation would be different than for chess? We call the game "chess" and not "kings" (and here we are still within the same language family). We say "checkmate" not "the king is dead". We still call the piece at the corners of the back row a "rook" ("rukh").

[BaghwanB]

1) Fences and Ladders
2) Don't Block Me Bro! (if developed in the past 5 years)
3) Snobby game #2 that only idiot-savants and layabouts can play well

The first comes from my elevator-pitch answer to "How do you play this?". Goes like this:

This is an empty field and we are both running fence to see who can get the most. The stones are the fenceposts and you fill in the fence when you get pushed. To keep it interesting (and not turn into "My side, your side") you can pull out the posts if you surround them yourself.

Kinda rural-based, but seems to get the idea across to most people quickly. Feel free to use at your leisure. Any talk of "eyes" or "living groups" comes later.

Bruce "From CA-LA-RA-DO" Young

[L.G.Hail]

Stone Field

[lobotommy]

361 Ronins

But "stone field" is a good one too

[quantumf]

The Art of War

Wargames

Strategy vs Tactics

Balance

Combat

Capture

Battlestones

Grids / Squares / Intersections

[daniel_the_smith]

I'm not sure, but we would definitely feel much differently about the customs of who takes what color...

[mlund]

I'm partial to "Stone Field" myself.

- Marty Lund

[palapiku]

The Glass Bead Game

[Javaness2]

It should be called Wurple, then it would rhyme with purple.

[cyclops]

Landjepik. As fas as Westerners have a command of Dutch. The word means land lifting ( or stealing ) and it is the name of an almost forgotten dutch game. The game was very popular among Western countries during colonialism. The children's game was played by throwing pocket knifes into the ground, the direction in which they settled into the ground defined new borders between territories. The knifes came in handy for solving other disputes as well.

[tapir]

Landjepik. As fas as Westerners have a command of Dutch. The word means land lifting ( or stealing ) and it is the name of an almost forgotten dutch game. The game was very popular among Western countries during colonialism. The children's game was played by throwing pocket knifes into the ground, the direction in which they settled into the ground defined new borders between territories. The knifes came in handy for solving other disputes as well.

We played a game called "Länder mausen" (that is the same name), but with sticks. As this involved throwing them after other children I very much doubt this variant was played with knives anywhere else. Its popularity wasn't limited to colonial times either (I played it in the 80s and 90s). I wouldn't be surprised at all if it is still played although the entertainment industry is working hard to make children unable to play games without buying equipment. + It isn't worse than all those "postcolonial" conquest games children play on computers.

I like the agricultural theme of Baghwan. I somewhere read a text that compared the grid of the goban to field patterns in an irrigation agriculture.