But you can! Go is actually quite easy to learn. There are basically three rules and one exception – everything else you’ll pick up as you play, like shapes and strategies.
The idea of the game is simple: surround more free area on the board than your opponent. Here 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.
Easy peasy... Now you know enough to start playing! 😊
But you can! Go is actually quite easy to learn. There are basically three rules and one exception – everything else you’ll pick up as you play, like shapes and strategies.
The idea of the game is simple: surround more free area on the board than your opponent. Here are the basic rules:
Two players take turns placing black and white stones on the intersections of the board lines. Black always starts.
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.
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.
Easy peasy... Now you know enough to start playing! 😊
Thank you very much for teaching me, I will try it out... 🙏