Many Faces of Go - Joseki Base

BGJ 135 Summer 2004

Reviewer: William Brooks

The Many Faces of Go Joseki Base is a very useful piece of software for the PDA created by David Fotland. It contains josekis for corner positions starting from the 5-5 to 3-3 points and has a very thorough set of variations. It allows you to do much more than just play through normal sequences, as it includes good plays, trick plays and ways to punish your opponent’’s mistakes. Moreover these all help you to see other possibilities during games.

I find it extremely useful as a reference tool when reviewing games, as you can see other possible outcomes and what you should have played. However, when playing through games, it can be infuriating when a move is played which is not joseki and thus you cannot see how to counter it.

Also, being on a PDA, it is a lot more portable than a laptop and a lot easier to access than any joseki book, as you can instantly access the required data. However, it cannot fit comments in it, as this would take up too much memory, and so there is no way of telling the best joseki. It is also highly addictive for playing through random variations while on journeys! You may find yourself missing your stop while engrossed in it, so I would advise always travelling with a friend.

It has a very large amount of data in it (50,000 moves!) but at 79k it is easily small enough to fit on all PDA’’s without making inroads into the memory. It only requires Palm OS 2.0 or above and so will run on nearly all Palm units (I use it on my Palm V).

I would recommend it to anyone with a Palm OS PDA as it is simple and easy to use and does what you want it to. However, it is not cheap, so I would advise people to try out the free 3-3 josekis before buying it. The full package and the free trial version are both available from www.smart-games.com.