Learning to Play Go: A Simple Guide

Recently, after a discussion in the comments of one of my posts, I found myself explaining the basics of Go to someone who wished they could play. Inspired by that exchange, I decided to create this guide to help others learn this fascinating game.

Go is often viewed as one of the most difficult games in the world, but while the strategies can be complex, the basic rules are actually quite simple. With just a few fundamental concepts, you can start playing and enjoying Go.

The idea of the game is simple; surround more free area on the board than your opponent.

These are the basic rules:

Game progress:
Two players take turns placing black and white stones on the intersections of the board lines. Black always starts.
Liberties and Capturing:
A single stone has up to 4 liberties (adjacent empty intersections). If an opponent occupies all liberties of a stone, or a group of stones, the stone or group is captured and removed from the board. Captured stones are counted as points at the end.

^{White loses his last liberty, and gets captured.}
Life and Death:
A group of stones with two separate empty spaces (eyes) is alive and cannot be captured. If you can't fill both eyes at once, any stone you place inside the group will be captured instead. The empty intersections inside a living group will be counted as points at the end of the game.

^{White can't play into either eye, because the stone would immediately lose all its liberties before black, and this is considered a suicide.}

The Ko Rule: This rule prevents endless repetition. If a stone is captured and the next move would allow a capture in the same position immediately, the Ko rule requires that the player make a move elsewhere before returning to the Ko position. This prevents the game from stalling.

^{If white captures black, black can't immediately capture white.}

With these basics, you can start exploring some of the deeper strategies and enjoy the fascinating depth of Go. Don’t be intimidated by its reputation – the journey of learning and playing Go is really very rewarding and fun!