How dreadful...to be caught up in a game and have no idea of the rules.

Faris turned on him. "Why choose to wear black today, of all days? I know why I'm in black. Why are you? Mourning?

He looked startled. "One does not wear mourning for a servant."

You still don't understand, do you? He was not my servant."

He regarded her anger, aghast. "What then? What else could he be?

Her empty hands shook as she held them out to him. Her voice shook as she replied, "Glove to my hand." Slowly she closed her fists. "Everything.

But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad's coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit?

Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double-entry accounting.

New rules for different games which have been introduced this year and must be used during the games.

It's hard because officially, by UIL rules, you cannot schedule games or sign contracts (until the realignment is announced). All you can do is talk to people and tentatively say, 'If this happens we'll play each other.' Right now everybody's just out there talking to everybody else.