Go is a 2 player board game about surrounding territory.
Black moves first, then White, and players alternate turns.
The goal is to control more total area than your opponent.
The game is also called Baduk in Korean and Weiqi in Chinese.
Blog Link: https://polgote.com/en/blog/how-play-go-tutorial-beginners/
Board
Go is usually played on a 19x19 grid
Stones are placed on the intersections of the lines, not inside the squares.
Once a stone is placed, it does not move unless it is captured.
Turns
On your turn, you either:
- Place one stone on an empty intersection
- Pass
The game ends when both players pass in a row, meaning both players agree there are no more useful moves.
Liberties
Every stone has adjacent empty points called liberties.
Adjacent means directly up, down, left, or right. Diagonal points do not count.
Stones of the same color connected horizontally or vertically form a group.
A group’s liberties are all the empty points touching any stone in that group.
Capturing
A stone or group is captured when it has no liberties left.
Example:
. . .
. B .
. . .The black stone has 4 liberties.
. W .
W B W
. W .Now the black stone has 0 liberties, so it is captured and removed from the board.
Capturing is important, but Go is not mainly about capturing stones. The bigger goal is to surround territory.
Territory
Territory is made by surrounding empty points with your stones.
At the end of the game, surrounded empty intersections count as points for the player who surrounds them.
Score comes from:
- Empty territory you surround
- Captured stones
- Komi, which is bonus points given to White because Black moves first
Under many common rule sets, White receives 6.5 or 7.5 komi. The extra half point prevents ties.
Life and Death
A group is alive if it cannot be captured.
Usually, a group needs two separate eyes to be alive.
An eye is an empty point surrounded by stones of one color.
If a group has two eyes, the opponent cannot fill both eyes at once, so the group keeps at least one liberty and survives.
If a group cannot make two eyes and can be captured with correct play, it is dead.
Ko Rule
The ko rule prevents the players from repeating the exact same board position forever.
If you capture one stone in a way that would let your opponent immediately capture back and recreate the previous position, your opponent must play somewhere else first.
This creates ko fights, where both players look for threats elsewhere on the board before returning to the ko.
Suicide Rule
In most rules, you cannot play a move that gives your own stone or group no liberties, unless that move captures opposing stones and creates liberties.
Basic Strategy
Corners are easiest to surround, sides are next, and the center is hardest.
A common opening idea is:
- Play in the corners
- Extend along the sides
- Fight or expand toward the center
Important ideas:
- Influence: stones that affect a large area even if they do not make territory immediately
- Thickness: strong stones that are hard to attack
- Sente: keeping the initiative by making moves your opponent must answer
- Gote: losing the initiative because your move lets the opponent play first elsewhere
- Atari: a move that puts an enemy stone or group down to one liberty
- Tenuki: playing somewhere else instead of answering locally