The origins of chess and related games are lost in time; yet, in spite of hundreds of years of analysis, they remain as interesting as ever, because of their fantastically large configuration space. The articles presented here are steps in the continuing endeavor to master these games, an endeavor in which the computer nowadays is often a valuable tool. In fact, the “simpler” board game Nine Men's Morris has succumbed to computer analysis, as reported by R. Gasser. Checkers may well be on its way: J. Schaeffer tells of the development of the program Chinook, and pays a tribute to the extraordinary (human!) player M. Tinsley. N. Elkies and L. Stiller write articles about chess, computerless in one case and computer-heavy in the other. Shogi, also called Japanese chess, is Y. Kawano's subject.

The last four articles of this section deal with Go, a game that has come under intense scrutiny recently. Although it is a territorial game and not, strictly speaking, a combinatorial game according to the definition on page 1, the board breaks up toward the end into a sum of smaller independent games, a situation that the theory of combinatorial games handles well. Other aspects of Go, such as ko, require extensions of the traditional theory, as explained in two of these articles.