Movies make humanoid aliens because it is much cheaper. Books are much more various and imagine all sort of body shapes or amorphous possibilities.

I think the assumption there is that the alien race is smart enough and dexterous enough to create machines. Wether they use tentacles, fingers, snouts or talons, it makes sense that such a species develops board games at a moment

> I can't remember a single alien movie with sea creatures or intelligent birds. But if anyone knows some, please let me know :)

While not exactly movie and not specifically sea creatures/birds, there are plenty of anime series and visual novels with intelligent non-humanoid alien species. Parasite from Parasyte, some forms of BETA from Muv-luv, aliens from Stellvia, (NSFW to Google) Saya from Saya no Uta (real form). Dragons are also often portrayed as intelligent race originating from space (e.g. Final Fantasy XIV & Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka?). Many of these usually have a way to appear as humanoid to make conversing with mankind easier though (and likely to make it easier for readers/watchers to relate).

There are some birds that are better at tool use than you might think, too.

It's worth pointing out that Go is a purely mathematical game. You don't need a board at all to play it, especially not if your memory is good enough. Chess Grandmasters don't need boards to play Chess, for example; they can simply say the moves to each other and both will have the same image of the board in their mind.

So you could have intelligent aliens playing Go entirely verbally. Considering how many alien species there are likely to be, perhaps this is almost a certainty?

> It's worth pointing out that Go is a purely mathematical game. You don't need a board at all to play it, especially not if your memory is good enough. Chess Grandmasters don't need boards to play Chess, for example; they can simply say the moves to each other and both will have the same image of the board in their mind.

Is it common to be able to play Go without a board? That seems to require storing 361 bits in your head. I guess it’s much sparser than that for most of the game and has more structure than just 361 random bits, but that still sounds hard.

Here’s a (strong?) amateur who claims to be the only person who can play this way [1].

[1] https://senseis.xmp.net/?BaoYun

We're talking about hypothetical alien species here. But yes, Go is a purely mathematical game. If you don't have amazing memory you can represent those bits in a computer and it's still the same exact game. The physical board is just a physical representation of Go; it's not an actual relevant part of it (compared with, say, billiards).

But yes, there are even some people that can play Go in their head. You're wrong about the amount of information though; each piece on the board has 3 potential states, not just two. Though you can chunk the board pretty effectively and it becomes more about memorizing larger patterns than the state of every single spot on the board. Plus, the board never fills up, so you only need to remember the spaces with pieces in them, not every space.

Well, I'm able to semi reliably play chess without a board and I don't even play a lot, go is a bit over twice the information so it's not that much.

Also, 400 bits of information is about two sentences.

Some humans can play Chess in their minds, yes. But would they have learned to play Chess if it was purely mind stuff? I don't think so.

We might one day have octopuses play Chess with us. But there may be other alien games we'd learn from them as well. Or not.

Why not? We have games that exist entirely verbally that have always been so. It doesn't seem an impossible stretch to have verbal games that involve mentally imagining a physical layout, especially because these are aliens we're talking about here who could easily have much better visualization abilities than us. Maybe it would even be an adaptation brought on by an inability to change their environment as well as we can.

> I can't remember a single alien movie with sea creatures or intelligent birds. But if anyone knows some, please let me know

The little-known Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home centers its plot around the idea that Earth whales are themselves aliens. A crisis occurs when a whale probe comes to check on the Earth whales.