rules of go

Welcome! I'm excited to help you explore the ancient game of Go.

To kick things off and tailor our lesson to you, could you share a bit about your experience with board games or what made you curious about learning Go?

I saw Go in a show/movie and wanted to learn!

Seeing Go in a show or movie is a great way to discover it! It's an amazingly deep game, but its core mechanics are remarkably elegant once you break them down.

Your path

Basic Mechanics: Liberties and Capture

Special Rules: Suicide, Ko, and Passing

Ending the Game and Scoring

The Board and Intersections

A standard Go board is made up of a 19x19 grid of horizontal and vertical lines. Unlike games like chess or checkers where you place pieces inside the squares, Go stones are placed directly on the intersections where the grid lines cross.

A top-down view of a section of a Go board, showing black and white stones played precisely on the line intersections rather than inside the grid squares.

I've set up a quick interactive preview above showing how the grid intersections work.

Why is it played on intersections instead of squares?

That's a great question, because almost every other classic board game puts pieces inside the squares!

Go uses because the game is fundamentally about network connections and boundaries rather than individual cells. Playing on the grid lines gives every point up to four direct orthogonal pathways (up, down, left, right). This structure makes it much easier to see how continuous walls of stones surround empty space to control territory.

Show me a diagram of orthogonal vs diagonal connections

That visualization makes the connection structure much clearer!

Side-by-side comparison of orthogonal and diagonal Go stone connections on a grid.

I've generated a simple visual to illustrate how that looks on the board. As you can see, stones only merge into a single, shared when they line up orthogonally along the grid lines.

Make me a flashcard about connections

I've created those flashcards for you so you can review how stone connections work on the board.

DECK

Flashcards:Go Connection Basics

Flash Cards

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0 completed • 11 remaining

One-Space Jump (Ikken-tobi)

See Answer

Now that we know how stones connect, let's look at who plays them and what the main objective of Go actually is.

Go is a two-player game where one player plays as and the other as , taking turns placing one stone at a time. Black always makes the first move of the game.