I don't know. You like this color scheme more than the old one? Any one you'd care to nominate?

I did a fair bit of traveling around over the holidays, including up to Akron to see the in-laws. While there, I happened to end up in a Panera bread and sandwich shop, playing chess with an Australian former Hare Krishna monk named Sean who gave me a copy of his band's CD. Life is weird.

Said Krishna (who looked quite normal - wasn't bald and bouncing around in robes or anything) was the boyfriend of one of Elisa's high school friends who went off the deep end into the New Age some years ago. She ended up in Australia doing psychic cleansing and running some healing center where she taught children that they were really fairies or something. I gather Sean is a Brooks Brothers-clad preppie stockbroker compared to the ex-husband who took her home to Australia in the first place.

But she was back to visit and hook up with her old gang - and so there we were, me and him, not really knowing all the old stories they were swapping. And he wanted to play chess. What the hell.

I figured he was some hardcore chess fanatic who never traveled without his little portable set and was going to kick my ass because I haven't played in years. But no. He had a big boxed, "family board game" style set from like the 70s - what was referred to as the "rennaisance chess set" back then, the same pieces I had in the first set I learned on. That took me back. And I think he just found it in the basement of her parents' house or something and decided to carry it around with him. As it turned out, I cleaned the floor with him first game, and then lost the second largely because I thought it would be nice if we split the series. I didn't throw the game exactly, but I did play a lot more recklessly and game two turned into me seeing how long I could keep him from pinning me down after it became clear I wasn't going to win.

Here's why I bring this up. I was telling him about Chinese Chess and later on it occurred to me that one of the big differences between the two is that, in Chinese Chess or Xiangqi, the pieces don't go in the squares but on the intersections of the lines. For that matter, checkers also puts the pieces in the little boxes, while Go also uses the intersections.

In fact, while I'm hardly an expert here and someone will probably contradict me immediately, off the top of my head I can't think of a single western "grid" board game where you don't use the squares or a single eastern one where you don't use the "points."

Now I'm starting to wonder. What do you suppose that means? Does it indicate some basic difference in philosophy? If chess is essentially war, then squares are land, I guess. In feudal europe the land wasn't just the source of wealth and power, it was wealth and power. So in chess you're fighting over and occupying land.

So what about Xiangqi? The grid of intersecting lines suggest network nodes, where information comes together, or more in period, a road network with the points as the crossroads. In Xiangqi and in Go, those are what's important, and they give you control of the surrounding land almost as an afterthought.

I wonder if this reflects a Chinese culture that had the infrastructure of civilization in place to control vastly larger territories than any single european state could control, through a stable government bureaucracy and information networks that could carry messages, currency, paperwork and trade goods all over the place. Perhaps they were playing chess at a higher level of abstraction - certainly Go is more about grand strategy than tactics - figuring that if you controlled the information networks and nodes, or the roads and the towns, then control of the surrounding land would necessarily follow.

Like I say, nothing's riding on this and I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I found it interesting. Anyone have anything to add?