Basics for Beginners: Rules of Go

Go is a lot easier to learn than chess, yet holds so much more variations. Go has only a few distinct rules, and the rest are up to one's own imagination and desire. 

♕ Players ♕ 

1. Go is made up of 2 players. (Unless it is pair go, but that is another post for another day) One person takes Black, while the other player takes White. The game starts with no stones on the board. Black plays first, and the two players alternate turns. 

♠ ♤ ♣ ♧ ♥ ♡ ♦♢ Objective ♠ ♤ ♣ ♧ ♥ ♡ ♦♢

2. The objective of the game is to get as much "points" as possible. This can be achieved by either encircling more territory (counted by the number of grids your stones have effectively enclosed) than your opponent, "killing" your opponent, or a combination of both. 

 ۞ Board ۞ 

3. The board is a grid of intersections. A player can play on any point (intersection) as long as it is legal (This will be explained in future posts. For now, just understand you can play anywhere you like as long as it is on a intersection; this includes borders as well). Two points in the same row or column are considered connected, while two points diagonal from one another are not. 

♛ Capture ♛

4. A player captures and removes a stone (of the opposite color) from the board when he completely surrounds the stone from all 4 sides. Below are some examples of what the moves leading up to a capture and the aftermath.

Black is one step from being captured. When white plays at 'A', the black stone will be removed from the board.

This is an example independent of the previous one.
The dotted lines represent the black stones that used to be there, before white completely surrounded and captured them.
Note: The border can be used as an easy way to capture stones, as it surrounds half of the stones' sides for you!

❉ Ko ❉

5. A Ko occurs when two alternating single-stone captures repeatedly capture the same stone, respectively. When this happens, a player needs to find a ko threat (any point on the board that is available and is not the point of the ko that the opponent will hopefully respond to) before coming back to the ko. This will prevent an endless game, where the players will just continually play the ko. An example shown below: 

When white captures, black needs to find a ko threat before playing at the point marked with an 'X'. 


✤✥  End Game ✤✥ 

6. When the game is pretty much over, but there are still dame (pronounced da-may), empty points on the board that don't really affect the outcome of the game, the players can either choose to play those dames or pass, depending on the rules of the game (Future post on this topic). A player will pass when there are no more spots for him/her to play. When both players pass, the game is over. The counting of the territory then begins, and the winner shortly calculated.

Please ask questions in the comments below for any clarifications; this can be very confusing to understand if not learned hands-on, but it is of vital importance to the playing of Go.