FridgeGo Rules

These are the rules supplied with the magnetic FridgeGo 9x9 Go Set. They were written in 2005 by then BGA President Simon Goss. The rules assume you have exactly 40 stones of each colour as supplied with the set. FridgeGo is a trade mark of Fridgeplay Limited.

Objective: The aim of the game is to control more of the board than your opponent. You control those parts of the board that you occupy or surround with your pieces.

Play: Each player uses 40 pieces. (The set comes with 41 pieces of each colour, but one is a spare and should not be used). You start with the board empty and take turns to put a piece of your own colour on the board, with Black going first. You put your pieces on the intersections where the board lines meet, including the edges and the corners, not in the squares. You can put a piece on any vacant intersection.

Capturing: You can capture your opponent's pieces by occupying all the intersections next to them along the lines on the board (their liberties). This white piece just one liberty left. If Black plays there, he captures the white piece. As soon as he does so, he takes it off the board and gives it back to his opponent to use again.

Pieces linked together by board lines share each other's liberties and can only be captured all together. These three black pieces are linked along the lines and have just one liberty. If White plays there, he captures all three.

If some linked-up pieces surround an eye, you can capture them by playing in the eye provided that the eye is their last liberty, like this. But if the white pieces had some liberties on the outside as well, playing in the eye would be no good, because you'd just capture yourself!

First capture: First capture is not Go, but is a quick and enjoyable game that helps to practice the capture rule and is suitable for very young children. The winner is the first player to capture one or more of the opponent's pieces.

Ko: Here's a common situation where the two players might capture and recapture each other's pieces for ever. To stop this happening, the ko rule forbids you to repeat a position that has occurred earlier in the game. So White's recapture here is not allowed. Instead he must play his next move somewhere else. If Black also plays elsewhere, White would then be allowed to recapture in the ko position.

Ending the game: If you don't want to put a new piece on the board when it's your turn, you can say "pass" instead. When both players pass, one immediately after the other, the game ends.

Who wins? Here (left) is the position at the end of one game, when both players passed. To find out who wins, the players use the rest of their 40 pieces to fill in the empty areas they have surrounded during the game. The result of this is shown on the right. Black has put all 40 of his pieces on the board and still surrounds 4 vacant intersections, so he controls 44 intersections altogether. White has filled all the empty intersections he surrounded. He still holds 3 of his original 40 pieces and has nowhere left to put them, so he only controls 37 intersections. Black has won by 7 points.