China was the birthplace of paper, the compass, gunpowder, and sunglasses. Somehow, in between writing, finding things, blowing stuff up, and looking cool, the Chinese also invented several of the most popular board games in the world today.

Mahjong, along with several variations, was featured in the fabulous GameBox Asia from PDAmill. Now a brand new sequel is out with two more famous games from the Far East: the emperor of strategy games, Go, and Xiangqi, or Chinese chess.

Click past the jump for the full review!

Once the game is installed and registered via the usual desktop installer, GameBox Asia 2 greets you with a home screen offering the choice of playing Go or Xiangqi. Settings allow you to separately adjust volume for sound effects and background music, and PDAmill has thoughtfully included the option to flip the screen 180 degrees to ensure that the landscape is oriented properly. Many of PDAmill’s latest releases have been landscape, and since both these games are played on square boards this must be a design decision. I don’t know how I feel about the overall landscape trend, but it looks good here.

All GameBox games are meant to let you start playing with a minimum of fuss, so let’s dive in. I’ll start with Go since it’s listed on top.

Go is one of the oldest and most popular board games in the world. Although the rules are simple — place your pieces on the board in an attempt to completely surround groups of your opponent’s pieces — the game has a reputation of being extremely difficult.

The main Go page lets you choose from New Game, Continue (your in-progress game is automatically saved!), Options (small or large board, AI difficulty), and Stats. Tapping Help brings up a couple of pages of history followed by clear and easy-to-understand rules.

The game screen itself is simple — black and white circles don’t exactly allow for graphical fireworks — but very easy on the eyes, even during long sessions. Little touches like the shading on the pieces and the board’s wood grain pattern make the graphics beautiful, and the background music is just gorgeous. I’m tempted to leave it running next time I take a bubble bath, it’s so relaxing.

Gameplay completely lives up to the easy to play, hard to master standard of Go. I’m familiar with Othello, which is similar to Go but only requires you to stake positions on both ends of a line of your opponents’ pieces to capture them. However, I had never played Go. Maybe that explains why, even on easy AI, I got my tail kicked. Repeatedly. Did I mention Go’s notorious difficulty? PDAmill is not fooling around with their AI engine.

While playing the AI, the unlimited undos and redos are a key feature. The Mode button also allows you to take on another human, and the Flip button means you don’t even have to rotate your device around so your friend can take his turn. This version of Go has thought of everything — it’s tough to imagine a way to make this classic game more pleasant to play on a Pocket PC.

Go could easily have been marketed as a standalone game. Unbelievably, GameBox Asia 2 has a second, totally different game included as well.

Western chess comes from a Persian game called shahmat, “king death,” which gave us the term “checkmate.” However, some historians think the Persians imported their game from China. Chinese chess, or Xiangqi, is very easy to learn for anyone familiar with Western chess. The object is the same: capture the opposing king, and most of the pieces move in similar ways to their Western counterparts. To make it easier to keep track of which piece is which, a Western skin is thankfully included.

Although I play chess a little bit (very badly), I had never even heard of Chinese chess. It was surprisingly easy to pick up and a lot of fun to play. Beating the AI on easy was no problem, but hard was much more challenging. The range of difficulty is excellent and will satisfy players of almost any level.

Xiangqi also has all of the features that made Go such a perfect transition onto Pocket PC. Both of these games are simply a joy to interact with. While they may not be showy, they are beautiful. Go and Xiangqi have been popular for centuries for a very good reason, and PDAmill’s elegant presentation lets the quality of these classic games shine.

Vital Stats: You can get GameBox Asia 2 from PDAmill’s site for $14.95.

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