Overview

These rules are a brief summary for those already familiar with the game. They will be expanded with more detail in the future.

Go is a two-player game whose object is to capture more territory than your opponent. Players capture territory by surrounding regions of the board with strings of stones. In their battles to control territory, players may capture enemy stones by surrounding them with friendly stones. Your captured pieces count against your final score.

Igfip™ implements roughly Japanese Go rules, which we attempt to summarize here. The major exception is scoring with relation to Komi and handicap stones. Full conformance with Japanese rules may be implemented depending on the outcome of discussions on the Go forum.

Board

The standard Go board size is 19x19. In addition to the standard size, Igfip™ supports a range of smaller board sizes.

  

Pieces

Each player starts with no pieces on the board, but has an unlimited supply of pieces to place on the board.

Rules

1. Black moves first.
2. Only one piece may be placed at a time, with players alternating moves.
3. After a move, any group of pieces that is completely surrounded by immediately adjacent opposing pieces is removed from the board. You may not place a piece so as to result in the capture of your own stones.
4. You may not make a move that recreates a previous board position with the same player to play. This is known as Ko and happens when players can repeatedly capture a piece at the same location on each successive move.
5. You may opt to pass instead of making a move.
6. The game ends after two consecutive passes.
7. The player with the most territory at the end of the game wins. Your total territory is counted by subtracting the number of your captured pieces (including dead stones in enemy territory) from the territory you control. Each surrounded intersection counts as one point of territory.