Japanese Culture
Learn the rules of Go in one read: liberties and capture, the ko rule, passing, territory scoring with komi, a worked 9x9 opening, beginner mistakes and etiquette.
Go reached Japan from China by the Nara period, already carrying centuries of history, and became an aristocratic pastime noted in The Tale of Genji. The Edo shogunate turned it into a full profession, sponsoring four rival houses in annual castle-game tournaments before the shogun. Today the professional game is anchored by the Nihon Ki-in, founded in 1924, and Go is played by tens of millions of people worldwide. None of that history is required to play. The rules fit on an index card, and by the end of this article you will know all of them.
A Go set is a board (goban) of 19x19 lines, giving 361 intersections, and a supply of stones (ishi), traditionally black slate and white shell. Stones are placed on the intersections, not inside the squares. Smaller 13x13 and 9x9 boards are standard for beginners and produce a complete, legible game in twenty to thirty minutes. If you are learning, start on 9x9: every concept in the full game appears there, just faster.
Go is a game of territory. Two players, Black and White, alternate placing a single stone of their colour on any empty intersection, with Black moving first. Once placed, a stone does not move, though it can be captured and removed.
Every stone, or connected group of same-coloured stones, has liberties: the empty intersections directly adjacent to it. A single stone in the open has up to four liberties (up, down, left, right; diagonals do not count). Stones connected along the lines share their liberties as one group. When an opponent fills a group's last liberty, the group is captured and removed from the board immediately, and the capturing player keeps the stones as prisoners.
You may not place a stone where it, or the group it joins, would have zero liberties, unless that placement simultaneously captures one or more opposing stones and so opens up a liberty. This is the prohibition on suicide moves.
A special repetition rule prevents an infinite loop in single-stone capture-and-recapture situations, called a ko. If a capture would recreate the exact board position that existed before the opponent's previous move, that recapture is illegal for one turn. The player who wants to retake the ko must play somewhere else first, which gives the opponent a chance to respond to the "ko threat" or to resolve the ko themselves.
A player may pass instead of placing a stone. The game ends when both players pass consecutively. At that point both players agree which stones are "dead" (groups that could not avoid eventual capture even though nobody bothered to play out the capture), and those are removed before scoring.
The most common method in Japan is territory scoring. Each player's score is the number of empty intersections completely surrounded by their own stones (their territory), plus the number of opposing stones they captured during the game (prisoners), plus, for White only, a compensation called komi that offsets Black's first-move advantage. Standard komi in modern Japanese professional play is 6.5 points; the half point makes a tie impossible. Whoever has the higher total wins.
Four rules. Capture, no suicide, no ko repetition, and count the territory. Everything else you learn at the board.
Consider the opening moves of a 9x9 game. Columns run A through J (skipping I, by Go convention) from left to right, rows 1 through 9 from bottom to top.
After just four moves the game's essential shape is visible: both players are staking out large, loose areas of potential territory rather than fighting immediately. This staking-out phase is the fuseki, or opening. The middle game will decide which of these frameworks survives, gets invaded, or gets reduced. If you want to see the diagram, it is in the Go chapter of The Mind Games of Japan, the free ebook inside MyRin.
Beginners overwhelmingly make three mistakes.
A useful heuristic is the proverb "corners first, then sides, then centre." Corners are the cheapest to enclose into territory, since two edges of the board do half the enclosing work for you; sides are next cheapest; the centre is the most expensive to convert into secure territory. That is exactly why strong players sometimes open in the centre anyway, as Black does at E5 above: for whole-board influence rather than local territory.
Reading ahead, counting and spotting shapes are trainable. MyRin has 30 Japanese-themed brain games, and ten of them run free in your browser.
Play free in the browserStones are placed with a firm, audible click rather than slid into place; a hesitant slide is considered poor form. After the game the loser says makemashita ("I have lost") as both players bow, closing the game within a frame of mutual respect regardless of the outcome. In clubs, the stronger player traditionally takes White, and handicap stones (Black placing two to nine stones before White's first move) let players of different strength enjoy an even fight.
Go is often described as a pattern-recognition game, and the description is accurate. Strong players do not read every variation; they recognise shapes (good shape, bad shape, the "empty triangle", the "tiger's mouth") and prune the search to a handful of candidate moves. That is the same skill MyRin's Monyo pattern game and Nurikabe exercise in miniature: fast recognition of a local configuration, then a decision. Go simply scales it up to 361 points and a couple of hundred moves.
The second skill is whole-board judgement: trading a local loss for a global gain. Beginners who come from chess find this the hardest adjustment, because chess punishes material loss immediately while Go often rewards it. If you want to practise the counting side, MyRin's Kakuro and Balance Scale games isolate exactly that kind of arithmetic under pressure.
Play ten games on 9x9 against a friend or an app before reading any theory. Count territory by hand at the end of each one. Once capture and counting feel automatic, read the Go chapter in The Mind Games of Japan, which adds the standard opening patterns, life-and-death basics and the etiquette of club play. If Shogi is calling you next, Shogi rules for beginners uses the same format as this guide.
Essentially four: stones are placed on intersections and never move, a stone or group with no liberties is captured, you may not play a suicide move unless it captures, and the ko rule forbids immediately recreating the previous board position. Everything else is strategy.
Start on a 9x9 board. A complete game takes twenty to thirty minutes and every idea from the full 19x19 game appears on it. Move to 13x13, then 19x19, once capturing and counting territory feel natural.
Japanese territory scoring: each player counts the empty intersections completely surrounded by their stones, adds prisoners captured during the game, and White adds a komi of 6.5 points to offset Black moving first. The higher total wins, and the half point makes a tie impossible.
If capturing a single stone would recreate the exact board position from before the opponent's last move, that recapture is illegal for one turn. The capturing player must play elsewhere first, which gives the opponent a chance to respond.