November 8, 2023

Chess and Go are distinguished by the rate at which the tree of possible moves grows in the first half of a game. Both soar to incalculable heights within a small number of moves, but Go substanially quicker. There are 20 possible first moves of Chess, and 361 of Go. This is essentially mirrored in the relative breadth of each game's entire arc.

This begets an important difference in the narrative structure of playing each. Both in and out of play, chess players study the explicit tree of moves in the the opening and endgame, tracing various one dimensional slices of the possibility space to see where they lead. Players seek to explore the tree as broadly and deeply as possible, a goal which is only rendered practical by its relatively constrained complexity. More directly than in Go, Chess players act as multiversal historians of possible realities rich with narrative intrigue. In the middlegame, they draw upon their understanding of these histories to fluently extrapolate potential futures.

To innapropriately caricature for the sake of demonstration, consider the differing forms of long standing heuristics taken from each game. From Go: Don't go fishing while your house is on fire, and from Chess: 1. e4 e5, 2. Nf3 Nc6, 3. Bc4. Go is parable, and Chess is history.

One of the fundamental axes along which games distinguish themselves is the complexity of their fully realized decision tree. Every game is fundamentally a static possibility space, and it is distinguished along the axes of branching complexity, obfuscation of the tree, and to what extent game difficulty revolves around one's understanding of the tree.