Am I supposed to know what "go" is?

Can someone tell me? I’m on level 46, and the new kanji is “go”, but it’s not referring to the movement of going, but something else. This is the second time this has come up, the last time was something like a “go hall”. Is this a Japanese thing? It’s odd that we’re expected to just know this.

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It’s the board game. With the white and black pieces? Remember AlphaGo in the news? The computer (or AI or whatever) that beat the high level pro a while back?

This is in the lesson content as well.

It’s originally Chinese, but it’s by no means obscure.

Semi-related, but the game company Atari is named after the go term atari, which is when a piece can be captured with one more move.

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Odd. At least I knew Shogi shrug

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And I’m not one of the bigger anime / manga fans here by any means, but people my age were often into Hikaru no Go, which I think did a lot to bring the game to the attention of lots of people interested in Japanese culture.

People who don’t know that series might just know that it is a board game and nothing else about it, unless they have some other connection to it.

I want to start playing shogi (since I play chess anyway, might as well right) but I also really don’t want an average game length of 80 moves

Well you can also read the explanation on WK (granted it’s a short one but if you read it then you’ll know for certain that it’s not about the English verb “to go”)

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Go was a big reason why I originally started studying Japanese.

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I play Go at KGS under username jaca.

Hikaru no Go opening theme helped a lot in level 8, I was having a hard time rembering the reading of 支える when I remeber the Hikaru no Go “Get Over” opening song:

君が今僕を支えて 僕が今君を支える
だから迷いながらも共に生きていこうよ 未来へと

I also use the name of the Hikaru No Go character Sai to create mnemonics that use the さい

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