Go, mainly because I like larger scale board games (19x19 size). Go feels like fighting a war (macro) with many battles (micro) whereas Chess is fighting a single deciding battle. I do still like Chess though. They are different games. A lot more people have played Chess so here’s my sales pitch for Go:
The rules of Go is very simple, more simple than Chess. You can learn everything you need to start playing in under 10 minutes. Yet at the same time it can be incredibly more complex. But even at high ranks it’s extremely basic at its heart. I have a greater appreciation for Go pro players because the skill ceiling is seemingly infinite (at least from my perspective).
Every game of 19x19 Go is virtually unique. The amount of possible (legal) games of Go is ~2.082×10^170 which is something like this number:
208 168 199 381 979 984 699 478 633 344 862 770 286 522 453 884 530 548 425 639 456 820 927 419 612 738 015 378 525 648 451 698 519 643 907 259 916 015 628 128 546 089 888 314 427 129 715 319 317 557 736 620 397 247 064 840 935
For context that’s an order of magnitude more than Eddington’s number, the estimated number of protons in the observable universe.
As for the game; You have these isolated battles across the board which at first don’t amount to much until these battles begin influencing and spilling over one another. It’s a constant fight for territory. Then at the end stage of the game, everything links up and ‘front-lines’ are formed into a big picture when the victorious emerges. My favourite game is the Lee Sedol ladder game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6QerXttau8
It’s also just a beautiful looking game. Combined with the way the stones can feel (such as slate and shell stones), with the “proper” way of placing stones and the sound of the stone hitting the wood. Playing Go with someone IRL is its own experience.
As for the requirement of memorization to be good at the game, it’s true that some amount of studying is involved with learning sequences (Joseki). But you need way more game experience for that to be useful as you also need to build an intuition for an understanding of patterns. It’s similar to Chess in this regard, but more.
As for counting the points to determine a winner, there’s an easy trick. For Chinese rules, rearrange the shapes into squares and swap an equal amount of white and black stones. For Japanese rules, it’s the same except you’re swapping equal amount of empty space (territory). You can then easily count by using multiplication on nicer square shapes. The amount of points for each side won’t be affected.
Genuine question (I haven’t played it): If it’s a co-op PvE game, what reason could there be for not having the option of client-side hosting? You wouldn’t need to have a queue and have lower requirements for server maintenance. You could play on official servers or community servers.