Our Software Catalogue
If you're a beginner please have a look at our Top Picks for Beginners page which contains our initial recommendations for you.
The items listed here are all freeware or shareware (if you decide to keep them you should pay for them).
We no longer host software, so these are all on other web sites.
We list software for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch and the Android platform separately, including various items listed below. Reviews of some programs are in our Software Reviews section. The American Go Association's Go Software page has details of some programs for other platforms (eg Linux).
Links that directly link to the software itself are labelled: *name*
| Name | OS | File size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
Go-playing Programs |
|||
| Dariush | Windows | 1.8Mb | A Go program by Frdric Boissac and Eric Marchand. It’s interface can also be used to play against a number of other Go playing programs, study joseki or solve problems. The free version available for download only plays on a 13×13 board. |
| Explorer |
Mac | 430Kb | By Martin Müller. Recommended Mac program Described here. Free since October 2001. |
| Gnugo | Mac (Classic) | 950K | By Hideyuku Fujiwara. Official website. C source available. Version 3.2 Described here. |
| Goban | Mac OS X | 6.2Mb | Version 42. Acts as a front end for GnuGo version 3.2. Uses SGF format. Can also be used as an internet Go client. Recommended Mac OS X program. Described here. |
| *Go Game Machine* | Windows | 832Kb | From the Nihon Ki-in, and Tei Meikou 9p. English-language version. Plays only on a 9x9 board. Reasonably strong. Very fast. Intended as an introduction to Go, particularly for children. Recommended Use is free, the Nihon Ki-in retain the copyright. |
| Igowin | Windows | 786Kb | Free 9*9 version of David Fotland's Many Faces of Go. Strongly recommended as the best free introduction to Go for those who have Windows. Includes an introductory tutorial about Go. Now available on iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch as various varieties of Igowin. |
| Leela | Windows | ?Kb | Leela now supports 19x19 and 9x9, replacing the Lite version Strength dan level. New in 2008. Recommended. |
| Many Faces of Go | Windows | - | Version 11 of David Fotland's program Version 12 now has Monte Carlo method ($89.95). |
| Minimago | Java | 156Kb | version of ImaGo by Robert Rehm Described in BGJ 98 |
| Peter's Go | Windows | 220Kb | Shareware Go-playing program by Peter Raffelsberger From Version 3 is in English. Different board-sizes and levels of difficulty. Recommended |
| SmartGo | Windows/Vista also iOS | 12Mb | Free 15 day trial, then becomes Viewer only, version 2.8 of SmartGo. By Anders Kierulf. Also available on iPhone/iPodTouch/iPad in various forms. |
| STOP | Java | Go playing program that works best under graphical interfaces such as GoGui or GoBen. By Folkert van Heusten. | |
| Turbogo | 32-bit Windows | 1.14Mb | Shareware Go-playing program by Arnoud van der Loeff. Includes an English-language tutorial. Recommended Version 5.0 (released 2000-08-20) 25 guilders |
| WinHonte | Windows | 826Kb | By Fredril Dahl of JellyFish AG from Norway, publisher of the leading backgammon program, Jellyfish. Free for download, but not re-distributable. "WinHonte uses several different neural nets for different tasks. Some nets are trained from self-play, while others are trained from pro games. It also uses alpha-beta search to solve local well-defined problems like connectivity and life-and-death." |
| Wulu | Windows | 980Kb | 13x13 Go-playing program by Jimmy Lu (Lu Jinqiang).Recommended |
McMahon draw programs |
|||
| GoDraw V6 | Windows | 1Mb | The latest version of Geoff Kaniuk's program to run McMahon Tournaments. Used in most UK tournaments. Approved by us If you use it, please consider a donation to the Castledine-Barnes Trust. |
| MacMahon | Windows 95 or better | 172Kb | Christoph Gerlach's program to run a McMahon draw. You must notify Christoph if you use it. |
| OpenGotha | Linux, MacOS or Windows | 3073Kb zipped | Luc Vannier's program to run a McMahon draw widely used in France and Ireland. |
Game-record viewing (and editing) programsAnother source of game-record viewing programs (SGF only) is Jan van der Steen's page. |
|||
| Cgoban 1 | Unix, X11 | 336Kb | An SGF viewer and editor by William M. Shubert. Supports the Go Modem Protocol. It is also a client for some Go servers. Free, includes source code. |
| Cgoban 3 | Java Virtual Machine | 6Mb | KGS client only, by William M. Shubert. It is also an SGF viewer and editor. Free, replaced cgoban2. |
| Drago | Windows | 4Mb | SGF editor, problems and database interface, GnuGo client. Foreign language versions. Free. |
| Go2000 | Windows | 1844Kb | By Changmei Hwung. Allows you to record games and positions, store them in a database, and index them on moves that you select. Uses SGF format. Shareware: $50 to register. |
| Go-Heaven | Windows | 500Kb | By Markus Stahlberg. Supports SGF and Ishi forrmats. Available in English- and German-language versions. |
| Hibiscus | Windows | 1088Kb | By Zjev Ambagts. Uses SGF version 4, also Ishi format. Can produce RTF diagrams. |
| qGo | Linux, Windows, Mac OS X | 2Mb | Written in C++, using the Qt library, by Peter Strempel and Johannes Mesa. Free. |
| Shodan | Mac OS X | Interactive study of games and problems. | |
| Smart Game Board | Mac | Uses SGF format. | |
| Smart Go | Mac | 464Kb | |
| stmgt | Atari ST | Available to members of gobase.org only. | |
Miscellaneous |
|||
| Arnoud's screensaver | Windows 95/98/NT | 359Kb | by Arnoud van der Loeff, the author of TurboGo above. When your PC is not in use, it plays through professional games on the screen. If the PC is in an office, this is a way of interesting your colleagues in Go. |
| Goban Screensaver | Linux | 530Kb | Go screensaver for Linux. Free and open source. |
| GoBen | Java | Graphical interface to programs that play the game of Go and use the Go Text Protocol (GTP), such as GNU Go. Ver 0.1.1. | |
| goDummy | Unix? | Bill Shubert's user-interface to a Go-playing program. This is a complete Go-playing program, without the move-generating bit. So if you want to write your own Go-playing program for Unix, you can start with this and just write the interesting bit. It supports the Go Modem Protocol. | |
| GoGui | Java | 15.6Mb | Graphical interface to programs that play the game of Go and use the Go Text Protocol (GTP), such as GNU Go. GoGui has special features that are useful for Go program developers. Ver 1.1.10. |
| JText2Sgfs | any Java Virtual Machine | 4Kb | A utility to extract SGF game records from from a single text file. By Steffen Glückselig Free |
| OpenGo | Windows, or Linux/Unix | By Jeffrey Greenberg. This is the source code for a Go-playing program, but without the actual Go-playing engine. Thus, it allows a would-be writer of a Go-playing program to get on with the interesting bit, the actual move-generating engine, while OpenGo handles the tedious stuff of displaying the board on the screen, collecting the user's mouseclick for where he wants to play, supporting the Go Modem Protocol, etc. It does in fact come with a few weak move-generating engines. Version 5.0. Free. |
|
| SGFsaver | Windows | 161Kb | By Francois Mizessyn. Screensaver for Windows that displays Go games. Free. |
| uliGo | Any system with Python support. | A program to practice solving Go problems. By Ulrich Goertz. Free. |
|
| Gnugo 3.6 | Unix (and Mac OS X), Linux, Windows |
Current version of GnuGo for Unix, Linux and Windows, by the Free Software Foundation. Version 3.6 (much stronger than previous versions) Free, includes source code |
|
Last updated Sun Dec 16 2018.
If you have any comments, please email the webmaster on web-master AT britgo DOT org.
If you have any comments, please email the webmaster on web-master AT britgo DOT org.