Eng
日本語Go is a two-player board game in which players compete to control more territory than the opponent.
Go Set
There is a Go set which is a board with a grid of 19 vertical and 19 horizontal lines on it and two bowls with black and white pieces that are called “stones“. All the stones are identical by the way, so there are no stones with special abilities. You wouldn’t have to remember how each individual stone has to be played. They’re all exactly the same.
Moves in Go
In Go black plays first, which might seem a little unusual. So the player who has black will take one stone and place it on any vacant line intersection of the board. That’s right the stones were placed not in the squares, but on line intersections, and since the board is empty at the start of the game, black has 361 options for the first move. Let’s say black plays. Remember that once you place a stone, it’s going to stay here for the rest of the game, because the stones never move unless it is captured, but we’ll get to that very soon.
Now it’s White’s turn so let’s say white picks another spot in a different corner. Black’s turn again and now White and so on. So what are we trying to achieve with these moves? The stones are just used as building material to make a fence a border around our territory and if we keep moving forward, then the same game that we just started with these four moves might look like this at the end.
The Purpose of the Game
There are many stones on the board but it’s not the stones that matter. It’s the empty spaces that they surround this is now territory that belongs to Black and White. In this game, Black has two large territories on the right and left and White has two arch areas at the top and at the bottom. The purpose of the game is to get more territory than your opponent. Even a little more (even one point more) is enough to win the game, so Go is not a game of destruction, where you need to crush and defeat your opponent, but rather a game of negotiation, much like in politics. On the surface this game is like a dispute between two landowners who try to divide a plot of land between themselves. In more modern terms this game is like a competition between two companies for the same market, much like the one that existed between Coca-Cola and Pepsi for over 100 years. Or in the same way you can imagine that there are two companies “Black Incorporated” and “White Limited” that are competing for the same market on the board. Nobody’s aiming for world domination extermination just trying to control a slightly larger part of the market. I understand it as you’re looking at the board right now, visually it might be a lot to take in so let’s scale it down a little.
This is another finished game except on a smaller board. This one is only 9×9, but the size of the board makes it a lot easier to see who’s winning and count scores. Let’s count the territory. So Black has sixteen points and White has thirteen points. So Black wins by 3 points.
The 9×9 board is smaller, but the principles of the game are still exactly the same, except you could play the whole game in only a few minutes so to make it more comfortable. We’re gonna stay on this board for the remainder of the course, and later when you’re okay with this board, you can also move on to 13×13 which is another practice board, slightly bigger. And after that one, you can finally graduate to 19×19, which is the board that you saw at the beginning of the video. So stones are placed one after another until the whole board is divided into sections of territory.
Capturing Stones
All of that sounds awfully simple, doesn’t it? But where is the deep complexity of an ancient game? Things get a lot more exciting when stones get captured, and this is one last rule of the game that I have to show you. Take a look at this these five white stones.
Look fully surrounded. And now if you’re Black, take a guess how would you capture them. You’ve probably noticed that even though the stones are completely surrounded there’s still one point left unoccupied and if Black takes the place, the stones get captured immediately. Why did that happen? The thing is that stones are not just some inanimate objects, they are like living beings that have their own breathing space. Like hitpoints in RPG games, they are the adjacent intersections right next to the stone and they’re called liberties.
The stone in the middle has four liberties, but if we put a stone on the edge the stone only has three liberties (because it’s the edge). And a stone in the corner has only two liberties. Now let’s say it’s White’s turn and White plays a stone right next to Black in the center, reducing one of the liberties. The black stone is starting to feel worse and if Black doesn’t do anything and White plays another stone near the black one with the next move then our stone gets even weaker. If black doesn’t do anything, another liberty is gone and the black stone is starting to suffocate. And if we give white a chance to play here one more time, White can take the final liberty and this captures the black stone.
Each captured stone gives you one point at the end of the game when you start counting territory. But it doesn’t have to be so sad. Black doesn’t have to give up the stone. Now that we are one step away from being captured we can help the stone and this situation when one of your stones or group of stones has only one liberty left is called “Atari“. By the way, Atari is one of the Japanese terms in the game of Go. There are dozens if not hundreds of them in Go. They might seem unnecessary or challenging at first but actually, very often they’re more concise and efficient compared to explaining them with English words for example. And because these terms are widely used, they can serve as a very nice pickaxe to break the language barrier if you’re playing with someone who doesn’t speak your language and you want to discuss the game afterward. And if the word Atari sounds like the name of a video game developer company, that’s because Nolan Bushnell the founder of the company was actually an avid Go player himself, and when he was choosing the name for the company he wanted to pick one of the Japanese go terms and he decided to choose Atari. Now let’s get back to helping the stone.
Group of Stones
If you’re Back and you want to save it how would you do it? I hope nobody suggested running away with a stone, because just as you remember the stones don’t really move anywhere. In the game of Go stone has to stay and the only way to save it is to play another stone right next to it. It’s no longer one lonely stone, now it’s a group of two stones. If the stone had only one liberty left, now these are two stones with three liberties. All of their liberties are now shared.
Remember that stones are connected into groups only along the lines, so if for example we play a stone diagonally, there’s no line connecting these stones, so these are two separate groups. Two stones and one stone are stayed separately and only if we play two times to connect the stones, they will be connected into a large group of three. The more stones you have connected along the lines, the more liberties they will have and the more difficult it will be for your opponent to capture them. However even if you have a very large group of let’s say 35 stones your opponent can still surround them remove all of their liberties and capture them. Don’t you worry though there’s a way to make your stones invincible and immune to capturing.
How to Proceed
If you want to learn the Go rules further and move deeper into Go, you should subscribe to the GoMagic YouTube channel, as well as check out the video lectures on the website https://gomagic.org. Also, we strongly recommend that you subscribe to the free GoMogic course “The Rules of Go” by following this link: https://gomagic.org/courses/go-rules/
You can also try a slightly different kind of fun on custom boards with Go rules. Just try our game Custom Goban.