The game of Go: a strategy game thousands of years old
A square board, two colours of stones, a handful of rules — and a depth of play that has occupied players for more than two thousand years.
Where Go comes from
Go was born in China more than two thousand years ago, before spreading to Korea and then to Japan, where it took the name by which the West knows it today. It is one of the oldest strategy games still played in an almost unchanged form.
The board and the stones
Go is played on a square board called a goban, ruled with a grid: the traditional format has 19 lines by 19. The stones, black and white, are not placed inside the squares but on the intersections of the lines — the first thing that surprises anyone coming from chess or draughts.
Beginners often learn on smaller boards, 9 × 9 or 13 × 13, which shorten the game without taking anything away from the principle.
Aim of the game
Control the board by building “territories” on it. Surrounded stones become “prisoners”, and the winner is the player with the highest total of territories and prisoners.
Why it is so hard to master
The rules of Go fit in a few sentences: you place a stone, you never move it again, you capture what you surround. All the difficulty comes from what those rules produce. On a board of 361 intersections, the number of possible games is beyond imagining, and a stone played at the start can decide the outcome fifty moves later.
It is this contrast — simple rules, immense depth — that explains why Go has been handed down for so long without ever needing to be reformed.
Frequently asked questions
Do you need to know chess to take it up?
No, and it can even be a false friend: in chess you move pieces with different roles, in Go you place identical stones that never move again.
How long does a game last?
Entirely down to the size of the board and the level of the players — from around ten minutes on a small board to several hours on a 19 × 19.
How many players?
2 players.
Discover our wooden Go set, or another strategic duel with Othello. The whole range is in our strategy games.