I like that, deep down we all make the decisions we prefer, no matter the liberties.
Doesnāt an empire have many foes, by default? Itās not just you vs opponent, even if there are different groups they are under the same ārulerā, no?
Surprised to see nobody has listed the one I heard first, and heard quite a few times. While itās not exactly real life, per se it can certainly be pictured fairly easily. 2 armies arrive in a plain with moutains surrounding the entire area. They donāt want to have to trek back through the mountains, but they canāt also have a pitched battle, theyāll wreck the environment of the plain, making it much harder to live in. So instead, they slowly each expand, taking parts of the board, occasionally skirmishing - but never engaging in a battle of huge numbers. Eventually, the whole plain has been captured, and whoever has more territory in the field, is obviously in a better position to slowly expand from their established positions and eventually wipe out the other army.
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Iām impressed, and I have to say I never like pirate-themed stuff (ACIV IS NOT GOOD,fight me 
)
After posting this I had a few thoughts, like trying to get an amicable divorce or a promotion, things in real life when you donāt necessarily want to wreck the other party if not absolutely necessary (but there are people who absolutely miss the point and go on destructive mode for the hell of it), but still your aim is to get more than the other side. But Iām not āintoā Go enough yet to get good analogies 
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How would sandbaggers fit in there, tho? 
How would sandbaggers fit in there, tho?
If you are a lawyer and getting a divorce or if you are a multi-million company suing a poor private citizen, thatās a sandbagger.
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Never had I fully understood the meaning of sandbagging until now.
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Being trapped as a pedestrian in the middle of a busy highway, having people from all sides yelling at you in Japanese: play big! play small! and finally just give up and jump under a bus.
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Hahaha! Thatās a bit pessimistic coming from an almost-SDK, but Iāll take it
My almost-SDK is misleading. I only play against the computer because it plays faster and I donāt like to play slow games. In reality my level is more like 18k or something.
The one time I played a live game I almost needed a new heart afterwards, so itās not for me, but why donāt you try blitz games?
The game is a negotiation. With many moves, you are asking your opponent to accept a tradeoff or make a decision (Do you want points now, or influence that you might be able to turn into more points later?). The game is many negotiations happening at once (While Iām thinking about what to do on this side of the board, letās talk about the other side for a bit.)
Even the end of the game is a negotiation. Interestingly, it is the loosing player who has the power in this particular negotiation. He can summarily end the game by resigning, or force the game to continue by refusing to pass.
So to me the metaphor of Go is for anything else in life that is a negotiation against an adversary.
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Doesnāt this metaphor apply equally well to chess (and most turn-based abstract games)? I would say that it probably applies better, since the āpartsā of the ship directly correspond to the āpiecesā, and you have to choose which piece to move now in order to be in a better position for the battle, and as the battle progresses ships get damaged and some of the ship subsystems are completely lost (pieces are captured).
I think that some of the other metaphors are much more go-centered, like the negotiation metaphor for example (since go does not end with ātotal defeat of a sideā but instead with āthe board divided among playersā). I feel that some elements of ābuildingā are missing in this analogies, since go is very focused on building from scratch from the empty board, instead of destroying preexisting resources. But I cannot really think of a good metahpor either 
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Go is like a small tech company. At any given time you can either work on fixing bugs in the products you have, adding features to the products you have, or building a new product in a competitorās space. You never have enough resources to do more than one or two things at a time, so you have to prioritize everything. Everything can have a huge impact at some point in the future, and you can never predict far enough ahead to know whatās going to happen for sure, so it all becomes about risk management and trying to pick a direction to move in thatāll give you enough flexibility to handle things not going according to plan
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Market analogy! Love it 
As a low skill kyu player: Go is like modern politics. You fight silly nonsense with more silly nonsense. You trump fake news with alternate facts and live in your own altered reality.
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That is more meta than analogy, no? 
OK, one more. As with some of the others above (the tech-company one was very good IMHO!) Iām trying to use this metaphor to communicate to the beginning player how it would FEEL to play a game of go, rather than trying to nail down the actual literal elements of the game (i.e. adding pieces rather than removing pieces, etc).
As such, Iām going to try to sketch out this metaphor where I see Go as a sword fight in multiple dimensions. So Iām going to start simple because I have used the metaphors of a sword fight to try and explain to beginners why itās important to settle their stones. So think of a simple corner joseki as a set of thrust and parry maneuvers:
So letās say Player A lunges out with their sword and attacks, and Player B raises their sword and blocks. The problem here is by reaching forward, and putting themselves off-balance to attack, Player A has actually left themselves open to counter attack - letās say their arm is stretched forward, and all their weight is on their forward foot, exposing their side. So now Player B, seeing that weakness, counter-attacks towards the side, and Player A responds by blocking.
Now that this cut-block/counterattack-block sequence is over, both fighters return to a neutral/ready state. For the moment, they are both āevenā and ready for the next sequence.
Ok, now letās complicate the metaphor. Letās say that both sword-fighters have the power to explore parallel dimensions in the multi-verse. So when the time comes to choose between options 1 (block) and 2 (parry and counter-attack), the fighter can divide their awareness in two, and bifurcate into two different sword fights that keep going in different timelines.
This is what it feels like to me whenever someone chooses to cut an incomplete group that hasnāt made life yet. Where before there was one battle going on, now there are TWO battles, and each is still far from over.
As the game gets more complex, and each player has more loose groups on the board, each one of those becomes a separate sword-fight in its own timeline, and each can end in life, death, or a draw (both live, one dies, seki, both die, etc).
At the very end of the battle, all of the branching ends of the timeline-tree get used up, you count up the living and dead sword fighters in all the different timelines, and the one with more lives ends up the winner.
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Awesome and at the same time I hope real life was not an inspiration!
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No - Iām just fascinated by sword-fighting for some dumb/juvenile reason 
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