Scott Boorman in The Protracted Game tried to model Mao with Go, and in particular, the anti-Japanese campaign in Manchuria. It was an interesting book. I’m not convinced that Go is a real analogy beyond beginner-level tactics, but he did convince me that Go modeled insurgencies much better than, say, Chess.
Chess: Battle of Chi Bi is exemplary. (I am not sure if that is at all informative to people who don’t already know a ridiculous amount about three kingdoms era China.) I don’t feel qualified to say anything about Go.
By subterfuge do you mean Huang Gai’s fire ships? I think of it more as a subtle pawn sacrifice which gets greedily accepted which allows for the invasion of Zhou Yu’s forces which starts a king hunt that forces Cao Cao to give up lots of material in the form of ships and would have resulted in his getting mated if he hadn’t a land to retreat to (and if he hadn’t gotten kinda lucky). I thought I remembered Pang Tong doing something interesting and symbolic somewhere in there (a counterattack on the opposite wing to draw away some of Cao Cao’s defending pieces) but I don’t remember if that was fictional or not.
What real scale and era, if any, is even roughly modeled?
Scott Boorman in The Protracted Game tried to model Mao with Go, and in particular, the anti-Japanese campaign in Manchuria. It was an interesting book. I’m not convinced that Go is a real analogy beyond beginner-level tactics, but he did convince me that Go modeled insurgencies much better than, say, Chess.
Chess: Battle of Chi Bi is exemplary. (I am not sure if that is at all informative to people who don’t already know a ridiculous amount about three kingdoms era China.) I don’t feel qualified to say anything about Go.
Why did you choose that battle? Subterfuge was prominent in it.
Chess may resemble some other pitched battles from before the twentieth century, but it doesn’t resemble modern war at all.
By subterfuge do you mean Huang Gai’s fire ships? I think of it more as a subtle pawn sacrifice which gets greedily accepted which allows for the invasion of Zhou Yu’s forces which starts a king hunt that forces Cao Cao to give up lots of material in the form of ships and would have resulted in his getting mated if he hadn’t a land to retreat to (and if he hadn’t gotten kinda lucky). I thought I remembered Pang Tong doing something interesting and symbolic somewhere in there (a counterattack on the opposite wing to draw away some of Cao Cao’s defending pieces) but I don’t remember if that was fictional or not.