![]() Sente's Goban is a virtual board which does a great many things, chief among them creating self-documenting Go games (Goban uses SGF files), watching or playing games on the major internet Go servers, replaying famous (and infamous) games of better players (or oneself), AND, LAST BUT NOT LEAST allowing you to humiliate yourself by playing against GNU Go 3.4 (or 3.6 if you download the latest) - which plays at the level of any 12-year old Japanese kid who's played for a few years. "Goban" is the Japanese word for the board on which one plays Go, and prices for these border on the ridiculous (primarily because Gaia does not grow 700 year old plum-yew trees fast enough to meet demand). ![]() (I assume the clock only works for network play?) And a little documentation would have been dearly appreciated for these more obscure features.īut it's free, so those are only observations, not complaints! For the price, this is a super-sweet little program which will let you enjoy a game against the computer (until you are about 10 kyu or so, at which point you ought to be able to kick Gnu Go 3.7's butt regularly) and give you access to view all those downloadable professional game files, and your own online game SGFs, with ease. ![]() (Attempting to use them at all is one of the few things that glitches the program up!) There are some features-such as using a timer-which apparently can't be activated at all. It would be nice if the SGF editing features were easier to use. SGF files with alternate paths and on-the-board notations don't work quite so well. Goban is fabulously easy to use as a game, or as a bare-bones SGF viewer. I have not attempted to download 3.9 and use it as an alternate player, to be fair, but my attempts to do the same with other Go game engines have all failed. It comes with Gnu Go 3.7 built in, but Gnu Go is now up to 3.9. The only reason I have not given it a full 5 stars is that it could use some updating and minor feature adds/fixes. I have only used it to play against the computer, as I use KGS's client software when playing on the server. I've been using this program for quite a while, almost daily, and have been very happy with it.
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