How Scoring Works in Go

Once both players pass in a row, the rules of Go hand you a finished board and ask: who has more? This page walks through exactly how that count works, using the scoring method this site plays with.

Area scoring, in one sentence

Your score is the number of points you control: every stone you still have on the board, plus every empty point that’s entirely surrounded by your stones and nobody else’s. Add those two numbers together, do the same for your opponent, and whoever has more wins. That’s it. This is called area scoring (sometimes “Chinese rules,” since it’s the standard in China and increasingly common worldwide), and it’s what this site uses for every game.

Notice that your own stones count toward your score, not just the empty space around them. That’s the detail that trips up people coming from Japanese-rules apps, where only empty territory is counted. See the comparison further down.

Removing dead stones first

Before anyone counts anything, both players agree on which stones are dead: stones that have no way to survive and would be captured if play continued, even though nobody’s bothered to physically capture them yet. Dead stones come off the board and count as if that space belongs to whoever surrounded them.

On this site, after two passes the board automatically estimates which stones are dead based on who’d win a race to fill in the surrounding area, and you can tap any group to toggle it between alive and dead if the estimate looks wrong before confirming the score. Most of the time, “dead” is obvious: a lone stone swallowed inside enemy territory with no eye shape isn’t going anywhere.

Occasionally a group is genuinely unclear. It might survive if the game kept going, or might not. If you’re not sure, the safest habit is to keep playing rather than pass: capture the stone for real, or make the eye shape solid, so there’s nothing left to argue about by the time both players pass.

Filling in neutral points

Points that don’t clearly belong to either side, usually a gap right on the boundary between two frameworks, are called dame. Under area scoring, filling a dame point with your own stone is worth a real point, because your stone count goes up by one. That’s different from Japanese/territory scoring, where dame are worth nothing and players often skip them entirely. Practically, this means it’s worth playing out the boundary fully here rather than passing early. How to play Go covers reading when a boundary is actually finished.

Komi: white’s head start

Black moves first, which is an advantage, so White gets a fixed bonus added at the end to even things out. The rules of Go cover why this exists. This site uses 7.5 points, the standard modern value. The half-point exists purely to rule out a tie, since area scores are always whole numbers.

Area scoring vs. territory (Japanese) scoring

If you’ve played Go elsewhere, you may have learned territory scoring instead, where you count only empty surrounded points, not your own stones, and captures during the game are added on separately at the end. In the vast majority of games, area and territory scoring produce the same winner. The two systems were designed to agree almost all the time, and the difference in final score is usually just a point or two. The practical difference shows up mid-game: under area scoring, playing inside your own territory to fill a dame or make a point of proof costs you nothing, since your stone count and territory count trade off exactly. Under territory scoring, the same move can cost you a point, since a stone on the board isn’t worth anything but empty territory is. This site sticks to area scoring throughout, so you don’t need to think about the difference while playing. It’s here for context if you’ve seen the other system mentioned elsewhere.

A full worked example

Look back at the seven-point board above. Black has 4 stones on the board and 4 surrounded empty points, for 8. White has 4 stones and 8 surrounded empty points, for 12. Add White’s 7.5 komi and White wins 19.5 to 8, a wide margin, because in this simplified example White simply controls more of the board. In a real, closely fought game, final margins of just a few points are common, which is part of why filling in every dame point actually matters.

Counting gets easier with practice, and you don’t have to do it by hand here. The board totals the score for you once you’ve confirmed dead stones. Understanding the count is still worth it, though: it tells you what your moves are actually worth while the game’s still in progress, which is a big part of what strategy for beginners is about.

If you want to practice counting by eye before the confirm screen does it for you, pause partway through a game against the computer and estimate each side’s stones plus surrounded space. You’ll be off by a few points at first. That gap closes fast once you’ve done it a handful of times, and it’s a good way to notice which of your moves during the game actually gained points and which just felt productive.