GO

A game of Go starts with an empty board. Each player has an effectively unlimited supply of pieces (called stones), one player uses the black stones, the other uses white.

Objective: The main object of the game is to use your stones to form territories by surrounding vacant areas of the board. It is also possible to capture your opponent's stones by completely surrounding them.

Players take turns, placing one of their stones on a vacant point at each turn, with Black playing first.

Stones are placed on the intersections rather than in the square and once placed , the pieces are not moved. Though if captured, they are removed from the board, and kept as prisoners.

Strings : Stones occupying adjacent points constitute a solidly connected string. It is important to remember that only stones which are horizontally or vertically adjacent are solidly connected; diagonals do not count as connections.

Several strings close together, which belong to the same player, are often described as a group.

Finishing : When you think your territories are all safe, you can't gain any more territory, reduce your opponent's territory or capture more strings, instead of playing a stone on the board you pass and hand a stone to your opponent as a prisoner. Two consecutive passes ends the game.

Any hopeless strings are removed and become prisoners. If you cannot agree whether a string is dead or not, then continue playing; you can then complete capture of disputed strings or confirm they are alive. (Playing during a continuation does not change the score as each play is the same as a pass.) Since Black played first, White must play last and may need to make a further pass.

Winning

At the end, count one point for each vacant point inside your own territory, and one point for every stone you captured. The player with the largest score (combining points from both the territory plus the prisoners) is the winner.

Note: There are many other rules and ways of playing - enjoy learning the various versions. No instructions come with this product currently. There are just too many versions of the rules.

Check out our other Ancient games such as Chinese Checkers