Make Your Own Set
You can make your own Go set. All you need is a grid board and some counters or other objects to function as stones.
If you are good with wood you can make your own wooden board and ink the lines on top. Card or heavy paper, or any other suitable material, can be used instead of wood, but paper based boards will not be so durable.
Note that on most Go boards the grid is not quite square, with lines spaced in the ratio 22mm to 23.6mm. This is so that it looks square when you play on it.
Do not forget to put a border around the grid or else stones will fall off the edge lines!
A typical Japanese 19x19 Go board measures about 423mm by 455mm.
For stones you can use many things, they do not have to be black and white, for example:
- Coins - pennies and fives
- Draughtsmen - or counters from a similar game
- Bottlecaps - screw or flip top
Or you can cut circles out of card, plastic or wood.
Print Your Own
To make it easier if you are using card, you can print out one of these pages, chosing an appropriate size:
- Half Size Prints on 2 A4 sheets - 60 pixel stones
- A4 Size Prints on 3 or 4 A4 sheets - 100 pixel stones
Print using the "Printer-friendly view" link at the bottom and we recommend previewing the print to ensure your set-up can cope with the images at the size selected and suggest printing directly on to A4 card. You could also paste the board and stones on to heavier card, or other material, and then cut them out.
If you require stones and boards of a different size then save the gifs locally and create your own print file. Unfortunately a full size 9x9 board may not fit inside the area printable by most A4 printers. Full sized stones are about 22 mm in diameter.
- 9x9 board This may need to be resized in your printer dialogue to approximately 106%
- Full sized stones Prints on 4 A4 sheets - 110 pixel stones
A3 Printing
If you've got an A3 printer then we've got a 9x9 and 13x13 board, the BGA Takeaway Go Set, suitable for printing doubled-sided and which can then be encapsulated if required. This is designed for beginners, school clubs and the like, so there's some additional information about the basic rules and where to go for more information printed to the side of the board.
- PDF file 4.5Mb
All Available Sizes of Stones/Boards
If you have any comments, please email the webmaster on web-master AT britgo DOT org.