More on the Rules of Go

Go Booklet

Our Go Booklet is most complete description of how to play Go on this site. It's presented here in 5 sections:

• Introduction to the game [1]
• How to play [2]
• An example game [3]
• Problems [4]
• Problem Answers [5]

Other introductory rules summaries [7]

We host Andreas Fecke's Go Comic [7], a cartoon introduction to Go.
The first part of this teaches Capture Go. you can play with the Capture Go Java Applet on our Junior pages. [8]

Here is a single page Quick Ref [9] produced for the UK Go Challenge.

Here are the FridgeGo rules [10] that were written for inclusion in the FridgePlay 9x9 magnetic set and have a standard set of approved Go rules [11].

Rules used in BGA tournaments

There are some slight differences in the rules used in different countries around the world, however for almost all practical purposes (more than 99.999% of games) they produce the same result.

The BGA has adopted American Go Association-style rules for use in tournaments, as opposed to Japanese rules previously. Please see our policy page Rules of Go [12] for the full details.

For a comparison between the various rules sets see our Rules Comparison [13] page.

Other Sites

Some other sites which also present the rules of Go in English are:

• http://gobase.org/studying/rules/ [14] by Jan van der Steen
• http://www.telgo.com/ [15] by Tel
• http://senseis.xmp.net/?BasicRulesOfGo [16] by Morten Pahle
• http://playgo.to/interactive/index.html [17] by Hiroki Mori

Other languages

For links to rule sites in foreign languages see our Foreign Links [18] page.

General Graph Go

The Rules of General Graph Go [19] are how a mathematician may see Go.

Event Rules

The rules of the events of the various British championships are in the British Championship [20] section.

Here are the rules of Lightning Go Tournaments [21] used in the Netherlands.