<blasphemy alert> Does anyone know some good alternatives to chess, as a game that mixes deep thought and aesthetic variety? I tried Go, but found it somewhat boring compared to chess, because of its uniformity (which, on the other hand, has the advantage of beautiful simplicity and symmetry.)
On another note: it is unfortunate, in my opinion, that chess has a special standing among board games. I would love to see some more variety in world-class intellectual matches, similar to what exists in physical sports. Something like a "board game Olympics".
Edit: Thank you for all the useful replies! In reply to some of you, I am a complete beginner at Go. Maybe the word 'boring' was not carefully chosen. As a programmer, I should have known better - that things may seem boring (tiresome?) until you become more fluent with them. I should certainly give Go another shot...
Boring compared to chess? As a Go player I take this as an insult. Go is way more interesting, there are more fights, more complexity and you make a lot of tactical and strategic decisions in one game. Also you have a great handicap system, playing stronger players is no big problem. Did I mention that there are no remis and pro matches are often decided by 0,5 points which is really little.
I am ending my rant with a quote: "Rather than being the image of a single struggle as in chess, Go is much more like the panorama of an entire campaign, or complex theatre of war. And so it is more like modern warfare where strategic mass movements are the ultimate determinants of victory. … As in modern warfare, direct combat, without supporting tactics, rarely occurs. In fact, to engage too soon in direct combat frequently spells defeat." -- Oscar Korschelt
I agree, but just wanted to add that if you find Go boring, I suggest you pick up a good Go book or two. The really good Go writers can construct an entire war narrative from a game of Go, all the while giving you deeper insight into the strategy and tactics at play in the game. To be honest, compared to Go writing, I find much writing about Chess to be very boring and analytical (though I'm sure that has as much to do with specific authors as with the subject matter in question).
"Go: A Complete Introduction to the Game" by Chikun Cho generally gets very high recommendations [2].
When you finish your first book a good followup is "The Second Book of Go" by Bozulich [3].
Finally, the series "Graded Go Problems for Beginners" is excellent [4]. Volume I problems are suitable for beginners starting as soon as you learn the rules.
If you have an iOS device, take a look at smartgo books [5]. Chikun Cho's book listed above and the graded go problem series are available from them, as are many many other books. These books are in an interactive format that works with their free reader app.
Right now I'm working through the book "How Not to Play Go", by Yuan Zhou, but he has many very good books I could recommend. Neil Moffatt is another good writer, and I particularly enjoyed "Double Digit Kyu Games" by him. If you're not afraid of diving right in, Yuan Zhou's "Master Play" series, where he dissects games by different Go masters are very entertaining as well.
You can lurk the go subreddit /r/baduk (baduk is the Korean name for go, helpful for web searches now Google killed the term) and Sensei's Library: http://senseis.xmp.net/ a wiki for and from go players.
The bitterness between the go and chess communities is silly to me. There is more depth in either game than any one person could ever fully appreciate. Hell, checkers has more depth than any one person can appreciate, and that's a solved game. Pick a game and enjoy it, and don't try to yuck someone else's yum.
I agree there's a certain amount of hubris behind the endeavor. But I'm interested in the design of balanced games, and the ways in which some old games are not balanced or rigid.
>I agree there's a certain amount of hubris behind the endeavor. But I'm interested in the design of balanced games, and the ways in which some old games are not balanced or rigid.
The creator's blog post is quite entertaining, thought it was a joke but the game is quite real and looks interesting:
>Chess 1 was a big hit, no question there, but a few issues have cropped up over the years. First, the original game ends in a draw uncomfortably often. Second, memorization (rather than on-the-spot intuition) ended up being much more important than the original developers intended. Even top players such as Fischer and Capablanca complained about this. Third, because it has no hidden information, the ability to capitalize on reading your opponent is more limited than it could be. And finally, the first version offered only a single army and one matchup.
>So Anand encountered a "mild surprise" in the opening moves that left him "flying blind" (meaning the board was in a position with which he had not previously studied) and because of that he decided to not keep pursuing the game. He just engineered a draw.
>ntuitive understanding of the game and moments of brilliant improvisation are the most exciting aspects, and yet memorized lines of play are so deeply entrenched now that when a top player encounters anything outside of memorized, studied lines he heads directly for the draw. It's really the opposite of what you'd hope.
> the ability to capitalize on reading your opponent is more limited than it could be
Shouldn't be a capitalizable entity in chess. I like chess (unfortunately I don't like it enough to practice it often) because of it's no make-a-poker-face-now requirement.
Since you bring up Sirlin, I would recommend Yomi, which is a card game that is very balanced and very competitive. I don't think it's as deep as chess, but I certainly enjoy playing it.
That actually looks pretty promising, but seems like it will have major balance issues.
To me the trick is preserve some kind of backward compatibility with chess while finding a way to increase the strategic content. Ironically stuff like increasing the board size like in 3D chess variants, can actually reduce the strategic content by reducing the role of long-term factors like pawn structure.
EDIT: I can see some combination of the game's features -- particularly the king "touchdown" -- sort of working against the strategic content. IE people just playing gimmick openings to sneak their king across.
Those kinds of "gimmick" openings don't work well once people know the game. It's like losing to the 4-turn checkmate: it only happens once or twice before you start looking for it and planning against it.
Yeah but this game has like 10 times as many openings so it will take much longer to learn them.
The reason why memorization is a problem in chess isn't because there aren't enough openings/endgames to remember, it's because most players need to memorize certain patterns to reach a certain level of effectiveness, because they would rarely be able to solve those problems over the board.
So the solution to the chess memorization problem isn't necessarily more openings and more complexity, which ironically could just INCREASE opening importance. Rather I think the idea is to increase the importance and depth of long term strategic factors like pawns, the sort of understanding of which grows over time and doesn't lend itself to rote memorization.
Agreed. I'm not even a big anime fan and Hikaru no Go really kept up my motivation when I was first starting. It's hard to believe how exciting they made Go look, when it's actually just two people quietly placing stones on a board for hours. Here's a trailer if you don't believe me: http://youtu.be/XpV4ZWh4NkQ
Magic: the Gathering? It's a game of infinite possibilities and strategies and has a big meta game around it, too. Plus collectibles. Plus cool artwork. Plus good apps.
The netdeck argument is probably for a different site, but I strongly believe that MTG as a tournament format benefits enormously from widely available top-performing decklists, video and text coverage, and articles on deck strategy as well game tactics with particular decks or deck archetypes.
The publicity definitely helped the game grow, but at the same time, people who play tournaments rarely deviate from decks based on the ones that the pros are using.
The people who play tournament chess rarely deviate from proven opening sequences as well. As such, publishing move by move accounts of Chess tournaments for documentation and study hinders creativity. See what I did there?
For ranked players, you are absolutely correct. That being said, there is still quite a bit more variety in chess at any level than there is in any given T2 cycle of MTG.
With MTG, even if I went down to my local card shop for Friday Night Magic, there would be enough people there with netdecks to ensure that creative attempts at deck building don't succeed very often.
In a local chess tournament, the level of play isn't even close to being that standardized. Most of the local chess clubs I've been to don't even have more than one or two rated players.
The difference is pretty simple. In MTG, anyone with 200 bucks can buy a world class T2 deck and learn to play it reasonably well in just a few hours. On the other hand, highly standardized play in chess usually only occurs after years of intense study.
There is, however, an easy way to fix MTG's shortcomings. I just play casual/peasant/other unorthodox formats. It makes things more interesting and its cheaper.
The difference is pretty simple. In MTG, anyone with 200 bucks can buy a world class T2 deck and learn to play it reasonably well in just a few hours.
So, I spend my weekends putting on a black uniform and working as a tournament judge at professional-level Magic events. And... maybe you're right that someone could do well at a local FNM this way. But at any sort of serious competitive level (even at the Pro Tour Qualifier level), your assertion just doesn't hold up.
You can see this in tournament results, by the way. Card availability is basically only an issue for casual/FNM play. At any sort of real competitive tournament, the field is made up of players who have access to the cards they want, and the winner is determined by a combination of preparation and skill.
Most importantly, you can see this in results from Limited formats (where players build decks using cards opened on-site from standard booster packs, which are unpredictable enough to constitute a random per-player card pool). Though there are certainly "Limited specialist" players, for the most part you will see similar lists of names among the top finishers in both Limited and Constructed formats, which drives home the point in a frankly undeniable way.
I wasn't really claiming that its easy to win MTG tournaments. I was just illustrating that fairly standardized play begins at a much lower level than it does in chess, because even beginners can buy a world class deck for a small amount of money.
Limited is a great format that I'm glad you mentioned. Anything involving a draft is going to be pretty creative.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that MTG is inferior to chess. I like both games equally well.
I usually reply like that because often I see the attitude that Magic is just a game of spending money on cards -- whoever buys the best cards wins. When in reality, card availability is more of a barrier to entry, and all it does is get you to the point where you're on an even field, card-wise, with actual competitive players. From there it's up to you to have the skill to hang in there.
Beyond the decks/openings analogy though, I'm not sure Magic and chess really compare well.
I think the most interesting distinction is in innovators vs. honers; Gerry Thompson is now out of the game at the professional level, but he was one of the greatest honers who ever played the game. Gerry was not known for coming up with new deck ideas, and in fact the few times he tried it he did horribly. But his ability to analyze the tournament landscape week to week, and make the perfect couple of tweaks to existing deck shells, was unmatched.
In some ways, the internet ruined games like MTG. I still like to play, but the widespread availability of tournament decklists stifles creativity.
In some ways, the printing press ruined games like chess. I still like to play, but the widespread availability of opening books stifles creativity.
(I have a lot of experience with MtG, and a fair bit with chess, and this is my go-to analogy. I could also probably write a lot more on how the "netdeck" attitude signals someone is missing out on an unbelievable amount of strategic depth, but that's for another day)
(not the op) I love Magic: the Gathering and played on and off for 18 years now.
It has two big downsides, the main one for me is that it's extremely expensive (a brand new console + collection of titles is equivalent in price to owning a couple of top tier decks).
The other one is that it's seen as uncool or childish or nerdish. I'd rather not mention it in workplaces anymore.
That said, yeah, building decks playing the metagame is very rewarding intellectually :) and having games 24/7 on Magic Online is great.
Used to love MTG. Now I play Dominion more - because "building the deck" (which was always the most fun part for me) is part of the game and it's decided more by skill than who can buy the better cards (i.e. at start of every game each player has a statistically equal opportunity to get each card.) It's huge in the "board game geek" scene, so apologies if you already know of it...but if you like MTG, I'd highly recommend it.
Another thing I really love about Dominion (from a purely aesthetic standpoint) is that the cards are, like chess, mostly archtypical. It doesn't have any of the sort of fantasy or sci-fi lore that permeates a lot of tabletop games and which can easily turn people off.
I've played Dominion, it's kind of interesting. Magic has 'Draft' and 'Cube' formats where deckbuilding with whatever you end up with is important, but it is indeed expensive.
I think Hive is the best chess "alternative". It feels lighter, but plays deeply and is never boring. It has an interesting geometric component. And there are annual championships.
(Get the Hive Carbon edition, it's much nicer looking)
If you see many, many people getting obsessed with a game, and you think it's boring, it's usually a sign that you're not understanding something.
Go and no limit poker are getting massively popular. They are both like chess, but much less tactical and a lot more strategical games. In other words, computers can't beat the best players in these games yet.
For whatever reasons, the status of games is somewhat related to whether they are "solved" by programs. Chess, like backgammon and checkers, is really on its way down.
I love chess, and play it all the time, and same with many other games. But the allure goes down once it is solved.
maybe all games will be figured out by software... but at the moment, no limit and go seem extremely exciting in terms of their possibilities/strategies.
Although the best chess players are now computers, chess doesn't seem anywhere close to being solved in the formal game theory sense (where we know how to produce perfect play that can't be beaten even in principle). There was a gap of over a decade between a machine becoming the world checkers champion (1994) and checkers becoming a formally solved game (2007). (Impressively, both of these were achieved by the same person, Johnathan Schaeffer.)
The difference, of course, is between "this machine can beat the best existing human player" and "this machine can beat any conceivable player as long as it's logically possible to do so". And right now we're at the former stage for chess (at least in some abstract sense: I'm not sure that a specific machine exists in operable condition that reflects the state of the art), but nowhere near the latter.
yes, absolutely agree. that's what i mean by "solved" in quotes. i mean that computers can beat the best humans, not that the games are solved in the absolute sense like tic tac toe.
>If you see many, many people getting obsessed with a game, and you think it's boring, it's usually a sign that you're not understanding something.
I love chess, but this type of thinking is flawed. Using this logic, the Twilight movies are misunderstood masterpieces, Justin Beiber is the millennials' Mozart, and WWE style wrestling should be in the Olympics alongside the decathlon.
I think it's the "game" wording that is wrong. I don't know what would suit better, but finding chess, shogi, go, xiangqi as boring would just mean you don't understand something. I was originally a chess player, but found the depth of go much more inspiring, once I "learnt the language."
you're right. i should clarify that i mean "a life long pursuit" kind of interest and devotion. That something could offer that many stimulating moments to many people intellectually and aesthetically and socially.
and "usually" of course. I concede that there may exist a game that many people devote a lot of time to that is not a "good" game in an objective sense, if there can ever be an objective sense of that kind about games.
> Go and no limit poker are getting massively popular. They are both like chess.
Go is, poker is not. The key difference is that in go and chess, all the information about the game is known by both parties. That's not true in poker, where each player has data that's intentionally hidden from the other players.
You can apply your first statement to most things in life. When people think things are boring, most of the time it is because they don't understand the nuances, history etc
The random element in backgammon is inconsequential: a good player will always beat inferior players over several games. What makes good players good is not that they know how to win when they have a good roll but the fact that with regular throws, each of their move is optimal, which guarantees a win over the duration of the entire game.
The same could be said of poker, where the element of chance appears to be huge but which doesn't matter over many games.
Backgammon: the best way to want to kill yourself. I was playing a 21-game match against someone on the Internet, it was 17-16 for him, but I was in a very good position and I doubled and he (incorrectly) accepted. I was about to build a 5-prime between my 4 and 8 points when he got a lucky roll, hit two of my blots and closed off his home board. He won a gammon and the match. One lucky roll, 1/36 chance and I go from still being in the match to being a 3% dog.
Bridge is a game of short-term and long-term memory, strategy (in long matches), tactics, deduction, induction, risk assessment, hidden information, and finally a strong test of character, and your judgment of the characters of others. Unlike chess it does not seem to have a "limit" where you stop getting smarter and start merely learning more about chess. There's a reason it's the favorite game of some of the world's smartest and richest men.
Another nice thing about bridge is that most tournaments are open, and even if flighted you're almost always given the option of "playing up". I, as a serious amateur have had the chance to play against probably 3 of the top 10 players in the world, and anther 10-15 that are probably top 100. I'm not talking exhibition games either, like a chess simul, but actual tournament play.
I played a lot of bridge through High School, tournaments, etc. I think it can become very robotic once you are just following conventions and can count cards without difficulty.
I think there is much more depth than your're giving it credit for - you can work on developing your own conventions, and there are many advanced play techniques - ever heard of a mandatory false card?
Nope, what is it? Nothing shows up in my Google searches other than plain old "false cards", which are fairly obvious. I don't remember bothering to name such a thing.
Basically the idea is that you assume you have, say, QT doubleton in a suit, dummy has J9x, and declarer is presumed to have the rest of the significant cards in the suit - perhaps the suit opened.
Declarer leads the A, parter plays low, dummy plays low. Do you discard the Q or the T?
Since you have to discard a non-small card declarer will know you have either a singleton, or QT doubleton, because with any other holding you'd play something else. If you have T singleton, there is nothing declarer can do about it except lead small to dummy's J at trick 2. However, if you can convince declarer you have Q singleton, the right play is to hook the 9 in dummy. Thus, playing the Q at trick 1 is a mandatory false card - discarding the ten will never gain, discarding the Q puts declarer on a genuine guess.
At very high levels, this gets further randomized because declarer will pickup on the Q likely being a MFC, and thus work to otherwise resolve the guess and get it right (e.g. play other suits and using deductive reasoning from that. - so at very high levels the winning strategy is actually to make the MFC most - but NOT ALL - the time, at random.
Right, this just seems like basic card tracking and reasoning, which is fun when figuring it out, and then not fun once it becomes routine. When you present a situation with only two options and one is worse than the other, you will have a hard time convincing me there is a lot of depth.
On the other hand, for the declarer it is just business as usual: you try to navigate the tricks making as few guesses as possible. At some point realize that seeing the Queen doesn't always mean a singleton, so you put that in the "guess" category, but the actual process isn't effected.
If you're doing that routinely, and actually getting it right, you could make a good living playing professionally. Either you were very, very good, or there was a lot of depth you were missing out on.
I take your point, and I'm enjoying discussing this. I was never all that good, although we did find the time for a dozen hands or so a day for months at a time. I just remember being bored by the "deeper" things, which my friends (those who were much better players) found interesting. Which is mainly to say, as the OP was bored by go, he may also be bored by bridge.
You should really give No Limit Hold'em or Pot Limit Omaha a try. Poker is a game of astounding complexity once you start taking it seriously and it's quite fun. Combine that with the ability to take a small bankroll, $100 or whatever you're comfortable using as seed money, and turn it into a roll sufficient for high stakes poker (with enough dedication and time) and it truly does become quite an amazing game to play.
I personally play heads-up poker. Unlike 9-handed poker, heads-up poker is constant action. It's more dependent on opponent profiling and maximizing expectation on the fly, using experience and statistics. A game of infinite variety.
Since April I've taken $200 and, playing online and live poker, have profited in the following ways:
+$6458 - online poker heads up matches
+$2900 - rakeback/bonuses from pokerstars
+$12500 - live tournaments and pot limit omaha cash
And that's merely playing recreationally, completely separate from my full time job. You can play a complex, fun game and make money doing it. Who wouldn't enjoy that?
I used to be a professional poker player, and although I agree that especially in the beginning -- while you're quickly evolving -- it's a lot of fun, after a while you do it for the money.
It's very different from MTG, where me and my friends would play for the thrill of it, spending whatever little money we had to play.
The easy test here is: would you play a poker tournament just for fun, if there was nothing at stake? Few people actually do it. The thrill in both cases actually is (or becomes) the money made/lost.
If you aren't enjoying it anymore, you probably shouldn't be playing any longer.
I didn't advocate playing only for the sake of making money. I suggested it because of how complex a game it is. How much time it takes to master. And because the potential rewards once you do are quite significant, which is a nice added bonus.
And I'm not sure when you stopped playing (pre black friday?) but I don't think there's a single point at which I've ever stopped improving. I know many heads-up professionals as well and not a single one of them ever stops learning and improving their game. Stagnation in poker is death. As such, I don't know why you feel like it was a lot of fun at the start but lost that later on. There is always another level deeper you can go.
The point of any game is to win. The metric that determines the winner of a game is different in every case. In poker, it's how much money you're making. But that doesn't have anything to do with the game itself. It merely depicts how well you're playing.
Learning to maximize expectation with true mathematical finesse while factoring in accurate opponent profiling and gameflow is one of the most challenging things I've ever had to do gamewise. I've played chess since I was 5, Counter-Strike very seriously for five years, WoW for the first 3 years before it went to shit, and have been getting into Go. And in none of those games have I achieved the level of mental satisfaction as I have from poker.
Edit: Was your stars alias RRiccio as well? Were you a cash player? You only have ~750 tournaments recorded on sharkscope.
There is always room for improving. What I'm saying is that going from level 2 to 3 isn't nearly as fun as going from level 9 to 10.
To put in another way: most MtG players I know are still in love with the game 10 years after they started playing competitively, while nearly none of my poker pro friends still play or enjoy poker 5 years after we started.
It's unlikely your $200 was a proper bankroll when you started, and it's even more unlikely that you or anyone else could consistently replicate these results (when starting out).
That said, I'm an ex-husng player, and played them professionally for three years, and I don't disagree with your overall message. Poker is a wonderful game, heads-up play is great and has almost no boring parts, and you can conceivably make a living at it if you put in your time and manage your money well.
How are the games these days? When I played it was primarily before superturbos, and I three-tabled $105s on FTP for just under a 60% winrate and 14% ROI.
I imagine the average player has really upped their game, though, and that the regulars these days would crush me on average--I'm rusty and the game has matured.
Lol, I never said I started out in April, I said I started my bankroll. I've been playing for 5+ years. I just restarted my bankroll in April because I had spent it on bills in February.
Those results are based on the following:
2,615 $3.50 Heads-Up Hyper-Turbos
1,605 $7 Heads-Up Hyper-Turbos
1,792 $15 Heads-Up Hyper-Turbos
16,715 $30 Heads-Up Hyper-Turbos
211 $60 Heads-Up Hyper-Turbos
I've also played a handful of MTT tournaments which are a miniscule part of sample size but which result for about $7,500 of that $12,500. I played the $880 Fraser Downs Fall Poker Challenge in Vancouver and cashed 3rd for $7,384. I also won $5,000 that weekend in one session playing pot limit omaha cash. So that is, indeed, small sample size, but the rest is not. Read on.
This isn't run good. Once you're up to a sample of around 5000 heads up hyper turbo games, your results begin to accurately depict your actual skill level. I've played 22,938 heads-up hyper-turbo matches since April with a 1.08% ROI, 51.80% winrate, and $6,063.56 net profit before rakeback.
And yes, I practiced perfect bankroll management. If you're not living off your bankroll, using a 35/50 buy-in rule (move up when you have 50 buy-ins, move down when you're at 35 buy-ins) is a good, aggressive system to use. If you are, 100 or 200 buy-ins minimum is best, depending on how comfortable you are with variance. I started with $200 which was ~57 buy-ins for the $3.50s on PokerStars. I'm now playing the $30s and $60s with a bankroll over $6000.
And yes, people can replicate these results. Easily. My results are, honestly, more on the weaker side among regulars. As for a beginning player, they could easily replicate these results if they actually studied. It's really not that hard to crush the $3.50s-$15s on PokerStars. You just have to think. Most people are there to gamble.
The games are excellent these days. Of course the overall player pool took a hit on Black Friday, but there is still tons of action. Hyper-Turbos have only gotten more popular, especially because the best players are booking some of the highest profits among all high stakes players each year.
As for a 60% winrate and 14% ROI at super-turbos, THAT is too small of a sample size. It's highly like you're a winning player with a great ROI, but you were on an upswing. You're ROI was likely in the 2.5%-5% range. The highest ROI I've ever seen was around 6% over 20k games (also someone hit 7.5% over 3k games but thats too small a sample). And yes, the average player is slightly better, and the regs have definitely improved as well, but fish are fish. The games up to $15s are very, very soft. The $30s are as well but you'll start to run into a lot more regs at that stake.
Keep forgetting about Black Friday. You can buy a PokerStars account from people in Bolivia/Germany/etc. and use a VPN to connect. I know a few people doing this. There's a new online site in Nevada right now, only for Nevada residents, but I hear it's a pretty big failure. New Jersey is very close to releasing it's own online poker site as well.
On top of that I think most US players play on iPoker skins (black chip poker, cake poker, etc.) which allow US players.
But yeah, all of them (apart from the Nevada/New Jersey sites) are technically illegal down there. Most professionals who didn't quit poker altogether and didn't transition to live either moved to Canada or some third world country with no taxes and cheap living to grind.
I think "technically illegal" should be defined here.
I played professionally a few years back, so this was my understanding of the law then, and I haven't heard of any changes:
It's perfectly legal, as a player, to play. Laws have been created that prevent banks from transferring money to and from poker sites.
When Black Friday happened, it was primarily because poker sites were committing fraud to work with banks to process payments.
There are still sites operating, however they take very, very long to process payments, limit cashouts to a point where professional play is not possible, and can suffer the same fate as the big three sites did on Black Friday.
If you’re looking specifically for an alternative to Go or chess then be sure to have a look at a list of the so-called abstract board games (Go and chess belong to this category too) on the BoardGameGeek: http://boardgamegeek.com/abstracts/browse/boardgame (sorted by popularity by default)
There are a few gems there that you might be interested in.
I'm not sure exactly what constitutes a viable "chess alternative," but if you're open to going beyond two player and investigating other styles of games, check out the top games on BGG (boardgamegeek.com). Many of these have a great deal of strategic depth and subtlety:
What board games have you played? In the last 10-15 years, the U.S. has experienced something of a German-style board game renaissance. Check out Carcassonne, Puerto Rico, Power Grid, Agricola, and many other less popular ones.
Kind of irrelevant, but board games seem like a great application of 3D printing. I wonder if there will be another surge in popularity when (if?) 3D printers become household items.
Have another go at Go. The handicap system is wonderful. It make two players of what ever standard have an equal match. There is a reason why Go is old and globally the uptake is far bigger than Chess - it combines very type of thinking. Strategic versus immediate tactical. Thinking globally versus locally. Chess appears too 1 dimensional now by comparison.
You can try Chinese chess (xiang qi) or Japanese chess (shogi). I particularly like shogi because it has the rule that you can reuse the pieces of your opponent you capture.
Both are a bit hard to learn though because the pieces are oriental characters.
Shogi is derived from xiangqi (same with Korean chess or janggi). And note that the characters are called hanzi or kanji (literally Chinese/Han characters), not oriental characters. It may be hard because the pieces don't have distinct shapes, but it's not after you learn/recognize the characters.
If we're going to start suggesting physical activities I'd say Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and rock climbing are both very chess like in their emphasis on strategic placement/puzzle solving. Your limb placement, your endurance, the way you shift your weight, the current momentum, they're all your pieces and you have to play them appropriately.
I'm a huge fan of both activities because of the combination of mental and physical demands.
Pretty unrelated but you can try online strategy games, personally I've played League of Legends for about two years and I still can't reach Diamond tier.
LoL does require some mechanical skill but once you get it down, it's 90% knowledge.
Another alternative is Magic The Gathering :) or HearthStone.
If you listen to commentators discussing matches, they can explain why certain decisions are gutsy, what the history of each player is (so-and-so is amazing at Medivac drops, so you expect that going into a game with him; so-and-so prefers the late game, so you'll never see him build proxy pylons), and the long-term ramifications of certain events (it doesn't seem like a big deal to lose 5 workers, just like a pawn sacrifice doesn't seem huge, but at the pro level of play, you'd better get something of equal or greater worth out of that; it doesn't seem like a big deal to know when Zerg builds their first extractor, but scouting that timing can tell you a lot about build order).
> LoL does require some mechanical skill but once you get it down, it's 90% knowledge.
At a certain point, LoL is about having teammates who you've worked with enough to anticipate and account for. There's a world of difference between baiting the carry and hoping your jungler will respond to your ping, and baiting the carry because you know there's three seconds until your jungler's dash is off cooldown.
Personally, I get the shakes when I PvP in LoL so what decent mechanical skill I have kinda fractures. :( I miss watching LoL streams, actually; they stopped working for me.
The best thing to do is play like you don't care, so you dont tremble nor doubt to make plays.
I've been playing LoL for more than two years, sitting in Platinum right now, still have a lot to learn, the most interesting thing is that LoL is still 90% strategy and knowledge.
If you're looking for something close to chess, you might enjoy Xiangqi, or Chinese Chess. It has a similar layout, but with a few changes, e.g. rook-like pieces that capture not the closest piece, but the second-closest piece. Two on the same file creates all sort of weird possibilities.
Go is not boring, but what you see in the game evolves a lot with your level. I have stayed a couple of year at 5 kyu with monotonous games. Once I have improved to 3kyu, games were a lot more funny.
Off the top of my head, if you're looking for deep two-player strategy with zero chance element, besides Go there's Othello (Reversi), Hive, Checkers, and Khet. If you're willing to put up with some chance, Backgammon and Battle Line can be very satisfying. For more than two players, take a look at Puerto Rico (finite but negligible chance) and Diplomacy.
A lot of the subtlety comes in because of the rule that you can never completely obstruct the opponent's path to the goal, but you can try to make it as convoluted as possible. Hence people try to multiply the opponent's options (so that they can be closed off at the last minute) and limit their own options (so that the opponent isn't allowed to block their unique path to the goal).
One of the most underrated games I have seen. I rank it as Hex for me: two awesome games, very little known (at least there's a very good Hex strategy book)
Diplomacy is a very good group game that even works by (e)mail. Colonial Diplomacy was also pretty good, but it felt like a sprint compared to Diplomacy.
Edit: Thank you for all the useful replies! In reply to some of you, I am a complete beginner at Go. Maybe the word 'boring' was not carefully chosen. As a programmer, I should have known better - that things may seem boring (tiresome?) until you become more fluent with them. I should certainly give Go another shot...