# Go > Surrounding territory with stones - Date: c. 400 BCE - Era: Antiquity - Domain: [Textiles & Everyday Life](https://lastcodex.org/en/domains/everyday/) - Rebuild stage: II (Settlement) - Difficulty: 1/5 - URL: https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/go-game/ Go is a game for two players who take turns placing black and white stones on the intersections of a ruled board, each trying to surround more of it than the other. A stone or group left with no empty point beside it is captured and removed. Chinese texts of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE already name the game, and the oldest complete boards found, stone slabs ruled with 15 to 17 lines each way, come from tombs of the Han dynasty. ![Go · Surrounding territory with stones](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/plate.CEi6476q_Z1Ultq0.webp) ## Legend 1. Board ruled with 19 lines each way 2. Star point 3. Black stone on an intersection 4. White stone surrounded on its four neighbouring points 5. Bowl of stones, with captured stones in the upturned lid ## What it is Go is played by two people on a square board ruled with a grid of lines, today 19 each way. One player has the black stones, the other the white. They take turns placing one stone on an empty intersection, never inside a square, and a stone stays where it was put unless it is captured. The aim is to wall off a larger part of the board than the opponent. In China the game is called weiqi and in Korea baduk; the name go comes from Japanese. The 19 lines cross at 361 points. Nine of them are marked with a dot, the star points, which help the players find their way on the large grid; the one at the centre is called tengen in Japan. A full set holds 181 black stones and 180 white, since Black plays first. The stones are all alike: unlike the pieces of [chess](/en/inventions/chess/), none has a rank or a move of its own, and a stone matters only through the stones around it. ## How it works Each stone touches up to four neighbouring points along the lines, above, below, left and right. Those of them that are empty are its liberties. A stone in the middle of the board has four, a stone on the edge three and a stone in a corner two. Stones of the same colour standing next to each other along a line form a string, which shares all its liberties and lives or dies as one piece. Stones that touch only diagonally are not joined. When a player fills the last liberty of an enemy stone or string, those stones are captured: they come off the board and the capturing player keeps them as prisoners. A player may not place a stone where it would have no liberty at all, unless that move takes the last liberty of enemy stones. The capture is made first, and the new stone then has the freed points as liberties. One shape could repeat for ever: a single stone captures a single stone, and the other side could capture straight back. This is called ko, and the rule forbids the immediate recapture. The player must first play somewhere else, which gives the opponent a turn to settle the ko. ![A board of nine lines by nine seen from above: in one corner six black stones enclose two separate empty points, and seven white stones surround them](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v3.DqTii9iw_ZDMuYJ.webp) _White can fill neither eye, so this black group cannot be captured._ A group survives in the long run if it encloses two separate empty points, called eyes. The opponent cannot fill either of them, as a stone placed in one eye would have no liberty while the other eye remains, so the group can never be captured. Groups that cannot make two eyes inside enemy territory are usually dead and are removed at the end. The exception is seki, a standoff in which groups of both colours share liberties that neither player can fill without being captured, so both stay on the board. The game ends when both players pass in turn. Under Japanese rules each side counts the empty points it surrounds and adds its prisoners; Chinese practice counts surrounded points and the player's own stones on the board. White, who moves second, receives a fixed compensation called komi, about 7 points in current play. ## How to do it ![A wooden board freshly ruled in ink with a grid of 9 lines by 9, its last line still wet, beside a ruler and a brush, an ink pot and flat pebbles, some of them painted black](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v2.BxsS1pVE_2oGSIP.webp) _A beginner's board of 9 lines each way, ruled in ink, and pebbles painted to make the two colours._ A board of 9 lines each way is the usual size for learning, and it needs only a small plank. Choose a flat piece of hardwood or plywood a little larger than the grid, sand the face smooth and wipe off the dust. Space the lines a little wider than your stones, so that two stones on neighbouring points do not touch. Mark the spacing along two opposite edges with a ruler, join the marks in pencil, then do the same across, and check with a set square that the lines cross at right angles. Go over the lines in ink or with a fine permanent pen, and mark the centre point and four points near the corners with small dots. Seal the face with a coat of oil or varnish once the ink is dry. A 19 by 19 board is made the same way on a larger board. For stones, collect flat, smooth pebbles of about the same size where gathering them is allowed, wash and dry them, and paint half of them black. Wooden discs sawn from a round dowel work too, with one colour painted or stained. To see a capture, place a white stone in the middle of the board and surround it with black stones on the four points next to it. The fourth black stone takes the last liberty, and the white stone comes off. Repeat on the edge, where three black stones are enough, and in a corner, where two do it. Then join two white stones side by side and count the six liberties the black stones must now fill. Safety: clamp the dowel when you saw it and keep the hand that holds it well away from the blade. Wear a dust mask when sanding, and use paint and varnish in a well-aired room or outdoors. Small stones and discs can choke a young child, so keep the set out of their reach. ## History and evolution Chinese tradition credits the sage kings Yao and Shun with inventing go, but the oldest evidence is written. The Zuo zhuan, a chronicle written down in 424 BCE or later, tells of a minister who in 548 BCE warned that a colleague was treating his ruler with less care than he would give to a game of yi, the old name of go. In the Analects, compiled by the disciples of Confucius after his death in 479 BCE, the master says that even playing games such as liubo and yi is better than doing nothing. Mencius, in the 4th century BCE, ranks the game among the minor arts that still demand full attention, and names Qiu as the best player in the land. He also counts it, with drinking, among the habits that lead a son to neglect his parents. None of these texts describes the game; Han writers of the following centuries confirm that yi meant go, and the name weiqi appears in that period. No board or certain stones have been found in a tomb older than the Han dynasty. Near the southern gate of the mausoleum of Emperor Jing, who died in 141 BCE, excavators found a broken floor tile with a grid scratched on it, perhaps by the guards; its date is uncertain. Andrew West counts 13 by 10 lines on the surviving piece, while Sun Meng and Wang Jihong report 13 by 9 lines on each of its two faces. The oldest complete board comes from tomb M6 at Xianyang, in Shaanxi, of the middle or late Western Han: a polished stone slab on iron feet, with its grid drawn in ink. Sun and Wang count 15 lines each way, Shi Xiaoting of the Henan Museum 16. ![Square stone slab carved with a grid of 17 lines by 17 with five marked points, and a few black and white pebbles placed on the crossings](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v1.NjX5niLm_ZFkJG1.webp) _A stone board of 17 lines each way, one of the sizes used under the Han._ Tomb 1 at Wangdu, in Hebei, of the late Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE), held a stone slab about 69 cm square, ruled with 17 lines each way and five star points. Handan Chun, writing under the Wei dynasty (220–265), also describes a board of 17 lines with 289 points. Sun and Wang take the different grids of the Han boards as a sign that no standard size had yet been fixed. The oldest board of 19 lines found so far is a white porcelain model about 10 cm across, from the tomb of Zhang Sheng at Anyang, in Henan, built in 595 under the Sui dynasty. Ichiro Tanioka places the arrival of the 19-line board in the 5th century, when the 17-line board seems to disappear from the archaeological record; John Fairbairn describes a picture of about 750 from Turfan that still shows a board of 17 lines. Tibetan go was still played on 17 lines. Well before the year 1000 the game was established in Korea and Japan. The Shōsōin repository at Nara has kept a go board of marquetry rosewood with ivory stones since the 8th century; Japanese scholars long took them for Tang work, and a recent Korean study argues they were made in the kingdom of Baekje. Under the Tokugawa shoguns, Japan supported hereditary schools of professional players, and visitors to Japan carried the game to Europe and America in the Meiji period, from the late 19th century. ## Key facts - Oldest texts naming the game: Zuo zhuan and Analects, 5th–4th century BCE - Oldest complete board: Xianyang tomb M6, Shaanxi: stone, Western Han - Modern board: 19 × 19 lines, 361 intersections - Capture: A stone or string with no empty neighbouring point is removed ## Requires - [Stone Tools](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/stone-tools/): The first cutting edge (3.3 million years ago) ## Sources - [Go in Ancient China, part 4](https://gobasearticles.org/fairbairnChina4.php), John Fairbairn, Gobase articles - [Go in Ancient China, part 5](https://gobasearticles.org/fairbairnChina5.php), John Fairbairn, Gobase articles - [A Pictorial History of the Game of Go](https://babelstone.co.uk/Blog/2009/04/pictorial-history-of-game-of-go.html), Andrew West, BabelStone (2009) - [中国围棋文物的考古发现和初步研究 (Archaeological finds of go relics in China: a preliminary study), 北京文博文丛 (Beijing Wenbo Wencong) 2017, no. 2, pp. 45–53](https://wwj.beijing.gov.cn/bjww/resource/cms/article/362762/636538/2018052316081786357.pdf), Sun Meng and Wang Jihong (PDF: Beijing Municipal Cultural Heritage Bureau) - [白釉瓷围棋盘 (White-glazed porcelain go board from the tomb of Zhang Sheng)](https://www.chnmus.net/sitesources/hnsbwy/page_pc/dzjp/mzyp/bycwqp/list1.html), Shi Xiaoting, Henan Museum - [The Opposition of the Literati to the Game of Weiqi in Ancient China (Asian and African Studies 5, 1996, pp. 70–82)](https://www.sav.sk/journals/aas/full/aas196f.pdf), Paolo Zanon, Slovak Academy of Sciences - [The emergence of the 19×19 Go board: a hypothesis based on the Yuanjia calendar (colloquium abstract, 2026)](https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/event/emergence-1919-go-board-hypothesis-based-yuanjia-calendar-yuanjiali), Ichiro Tanioka, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science - [A Research into the Red-Lacquered Zelkova Wood Cabinet and Its Contents Housed at the Shosoin Repository in Japan (2014)](https://scholar.kyobobook.co.kr/article/detail/4010023834429), Korean Society of Design for Formative Arts - [Basic Rules of Go](https://www.britgo.org/intro/intro2.html), British Go Association - [The Japanese Rules of Go (1989), translated by James Davies](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wjh/go/rules/Japanese.html), Nihon Ki-in and Kansai Ki-in (text hosted by Carnegie Mellon University) - [Names for the parts of the Go board](https://archive.nihonkiin.or.jp/lesson/knowledge-e/yobikata.htm), Nihon Ki-in - [History of Go](https://intergofed.org/history-of-go/), International Go Federation Fact-checked on 2026-10-17. --- The Last Codex · https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/go-game/ · © The Last Codex. 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