The game of Weiqi looked to be, from a play, culture and place in society point of view, a very similar game to chess. They are both games that take great skill and their players are prized for their intellect and abilities. They both had a high standing in courts and seats of power yet were played by the lower classes as well. They acted, each in their respective cultures, as touchstones that anyone could understand, even if they were from a different social cast or background. All that being said, I see one critical difference between Weiqi and chess, and that is aesthetics.

Now, that may not seem like a huge issue; chess had abstracted pieces depending on the style. The issue is, even in its most abstract form, a King is still a King. The pawns don’t cease to be pawns, nor do they cease to be thought of as pawns, in the abstract style. Those little rounded pawn pieces stand symbolically for people, the mass of lowly soldiers that charge across the battlefield. The same goes for all the other chessmen, be it Kings or rooks or Bishops. The exact meaning of the piece may have changed, but their symbolic nature didn’t.

Weiqi, conversely, lacks this symbolic nature. As far as I could tell, the small tiles were exactly what they appeared to be. There was no deeper meaning, no social commentary. The game of Weiqi is a game, nothing more. All further social constructions around it stem from its nature as a game instead of an allegory.

This meaning being placed on the game play instead of on the physical trappings struck me as unusual, not just between Chess and Weiqi but between Weiqi and most other games. There are other equivalently abstracted games, such as checkers and backgammon,but these never achieved the same popularity in their respective cultures, nor did they have the same social cache or value placed on their play.

Extending this into modern day, the popularity of abstract games in the US (I talk about this because I cannot talk about other cultures with any authority) seems to have waned. Most board games, starting in the early 1900’s, revolved around some theme or core idea. The previous readings of historical games were full of such examples and often they were not just imbued with a theme, but a didactic agenda. Modern board games, again, fall into this, with popular examples like Settlers of Catan and Munchkin. These games have themes, Weiqi does not.

I wonder how other Chinese games, both from antiquity and those of modern construction, stack up in this regard. Do Chinese players tend to gravitate to games without deeper meaning beyond the rules? Is this a fluke, a one time example? What do modern, indigenously developed games in China look like now? Unfortunately my greatest exposure with Chinese games comes from the articles and pictures of cheap knockoffs, so a truly home grown Chinese title is something I could not name. In any case, why did a purely abstract game take root so well in China, and yet failed to move west, when the opposite happened in Europe, but failed to move east?