How to Play Go: The Whole Game in Five Rules

Updated August 2026

Go is the rare game whose rules fit on a postcard and whose play does not fit in a library. Chess has six pieces that each move differently; Go has one kind of stone that never moves at all. Everything below is the complete ruleset — there is nothing else to learn — followed by the two ideas you need before the rules start feeling like a game.

The five rules

1. Players alternate placing a stone on an empty intersection. Black goes first. Stones never move once placed.
2. Stones of one colour that touch along the lines form a group and live or die together.
3. An empty point next to a group is a liberty. When a group's last liberty is filled, it is captured and removed from the board immediately.
4. You may not play a move that leaves your own group with no liberties — unless that same move captures, which frees a liberty and makes it legal.
5. You may not immediately recreate the position from one move ago. This is the ko rule, and it exists so that a single stone cannot be captured back and forth forever.

The game ends when both players pass in a row, because neither can gain anything by playing. Then you count.

Two eyes: the only way to live

An eye is an empty point completely surrounded by your own stones. A group with a single eye can still be killed — your opponent fills every outside liberty, and the last move fills the eye. But a group with two separate eyes can never be captured at all, and the reason is rule four. To capture, your opponent must fill the final liberty. With two eyes there are two final liberties, and filling either one first would be a move that leaves their own stone with no liberty next to a group that still has the other eye. It is illegal. The group is alive forever, and no sequence of play can change that.

This single fact is what makes Go a game rather than a race to fill a grid. Every fight in Go is ultimately about whether a group can build two eyes, or be stopped from building them. When you hear players talk about life and death, that is all they mean.

Counting: what you are actually competing for

There are two common counting methods and they almost always give the same winner. Area scoring counts your stones on the board plus the empty points surrounded only by your stones. Territory scoring counts only the surrounded empty points, plus prisoners you took. Area scoring is what computer programs use because it needs no agreement about which stones are dead — under it, dead stones are simply captured for real before anyone passes.

Because Black moves first, White is given compensation points called komi, usually 6.5 on a small board. The half point exists purely so that games cannot end in a draw.

Why beginners should start on 9×9

The full board is 19 lines and a game takes an hour or more. A nine-line board takes a few minutes and contains every concept: corners are still worth more than the centre, groups still need two eyes, ko fights still happen. What it removes is the long opening, which is the part that takes years to understand and contributes nothing to learning the rules. Strong players still use 9×9 to practise fighting.

On any size, the corners are the most valuable ground, and the reason is arithmetic: a corner needs stones on only two sides to enclose territory, an edge needs three, and the centre needs four. Almost every beginner plays the middle first and then discovers there is nothing there to surround.

A practical plan for your first ten games

1. Play your first stones near the corners, on the third or fourth line in from the edge.
2. When a group of yours has only one or two liberties left, either give it a liberty or accept the loss and play elsewhere — do not add stones to a group that cannot be saved.
3. Before answering your opponent's move, look once around the whole board. If there is a bigger empty area somewhere else, go there instead.
4. Count the board before starting a fight. If you are ahead, simplify; if you are behind, complicate.
5. Pass only when every remaining move would fill your own eyes. Passing early hands your opponent a free move.

That is the whole game. The rules take five minutes and the rest takes as long as you want to give it, which is exactly why people have been playing it for two and a half thousand years.