THE co-founder of an Oxford club dedicated to a 4,000-year-old board game has appealed for more people to give his hobby a try.

Harry Fearnley would like people who enjoy playing board games to join him and his companions in weekly sessions playing the chess-style game Go.

Go was invented in China and sees players compete for control of a 19x19 square grid.

Players take it in turns to place either white or black stones on the grid, with the winner controlling most of the board at the end of the game.

Beginners and younger players can play on boards measuring 9x9 and a handicap system allows novices to take on experts in a fair contest.

Mr Fearnley, 59, from Iffley, said: "The rules are very easy to learn - you can pick them up in a few minutes.

"Players need visual perception, a sense of patterns you can see on the board and an ability to balance up lots of different competing demands at the same time.

"It's a creative game. You build up territory, unlike chess and draughts where you destroy things or take them away. You will always find people to play and get a reasonable game with and it's not just maths and computer nerds - though I'm one of those."

Mr Fearnley co-founded the Oxford City Go Club in the early 1980s, having first been introduced to the game in the 1960s. He said: "A boy I was at school with brought in a book of rules, but did not have a board.

"I found it fascinating how simple the rules were and the fact it was at least the equal of chess. I thought 'I have got to find out more than this'."

About 20 people now join the club in Tuesday night Go sessions at the Freud café-bar, in Walton Street, Jericho. Mr Fearnley said the club had been responsible for three marriages.

He added he had been fortunate in teaching former British and European Go champion Matthew Macfadyen the game at the club, but said: "Without me, he would have been even better."

Mr Fearnley said members could play in tournaments arranged through the club.

He said: "The tournaments are really hard work and leave you completely drained, but they are really enjoyable and very hard intellectual activity.

"The professionals are almost sublime. They do things you think are almost impossible."