How to Play Go: Your First Game Step by Step
How to play Go in short: two players take turns placing black and white stones on the crossing points of a grid, and a stone or connected group is captured when the opponent fills the last empty point beside it. You win by controlling more of the board than your opponent, counting your stones plus the empty points they surround. Black plays first, White gets 7.5 points of compensation at the end, and the game finishes when both players pass. Start on a 9x9 board and your first game will take about twenty minutes.
Knowing the rules of Go and knowing how to actually play a game are two different things. The rules take five minutes. This page is the other part: a walk through a first game from the opening move to the final count, so you know roughly what to do when the board is empty and it’s your turn.
Play your first few games on a 9x9 board, not the full 19x19 size. Everything below applies to any board size. 9x9 just finishes fast enough that you can play several games in an evening and actually learn something from each one, instead of getting lost in a 19x19 board with 361 points and no idea where to look.
Nobody plays a first game well, and that’s fine. The steps below aren’t a formula that guarantees a win. They’re the habits that stop you from making the kind of move that loses a game outright, like leaving a big group with no eyes and no way out. Everything past that is judgment you build up by playing.
Before you start: the four rules you need
Four rules cover almost every move you will make. The rest of the rule set is detail you can pick up as it comes up.
Liberties. The empty points directly beside a stone, along the lines and not diagonally, are its liberties. Stones of the same colour that touch each other form a group and share their liberties, which is why connecting is a defensive move. Liberties and capture covers the counting in full.
Capture. Fill the last liberty of a stone or group and it comes off the board immediately, however many stones it contains. A group down to its final liberty is in atari and has one move to run, connect, or be taken.
No suicide. You cannot place a stone where it would have no liberties, unless that same move captures opponent stones and frees the space up. This is the rule that makes two eyes unkillable, which is the whole of life and death.
Ko. You cannot play a move that recreates a board position that has already occurred. In practice this means you cannot instantly recapture a single stone that just captured one of yours. Play somewhere else first, then come back.
Without that rule the same two stones would capture each other back and forth for the rest of the game. The ko rule explained walks a full ko fight through move by move.
Setting up a real board
If you are playing on wood rather than a screen, the setup takes ten seconds. The board starts empty. Black plays first, and by convention the weaker or younger player takes Black; in an even game between equals, players often just guess a handful of stones to decide. Stones go on the intersections, including the ones on the outside edge, never inside the squares.
A full 19x19 set has 181 black stones and 180 white, which is one for every point on the board plus one for Black, because Black has to be able to fill every point. You will never use them all. Each player keeps their stones in a bowl beside the board and uses the upturned lid for captured stones, which is only bookkeeping under the area scoring used here, and stones are picked up between the first and middle fingers rather than pinched.
The nine marked dots on a 19x19 board are the star points, and they do two jobs: they help you judge distances, and they are where handicap stones go when one player is stronger. A 13x13 board has five of them and a 9x9 board has five as well. Handicap Go covers how many stones to use for a given gap in strength.
Step 1: Start in a corner
Don’t open in the center. A stone in the corner needs far fewer friends to wall off territory than a stone in the middle does, because two edges of the board are already doing some of the work for you. Strong players open near the corners and sides for exactly this reason: it’s the most efficient way to spend your early moves.
You don’t need to find the “best” opening move. On a 9x9 board especially, several different corner points work fine. Pick one, play it, and move on. The game is won or lost later, not on move one.
Step 2: Claim more than one corner
After the first exchange, look for your next biggest open area rather than reinforcing the corner you already have. A second corner or a wide side is usually worth more than adding a second stone right next to your first one.
This is the “big point before small point” habit: early on, a stone in open territory is almost always worth more than a stone tightening up an area you already control. Strategy for beginners covers this idea in more depth once you’ve got a few games under your belt.
Step 3: Extend along the side, don’t just add stones nearby
Once you’ve got a stone in a corner, the natural follow-up is to extend it along the side, stretching your influence out from the corner rather than piling stones on top of each other. A wide extension covers more ground with the same number of stones.
There’s a balance here: extend too far and your stones can be cut apart or invaded from between; stay too close together and you’re wasting moves. Early on, don’t worry about finding the exact right spacing. Leaving a two or three-line gap is a reasonable default.
This is also the point where your opponent’s stones start to matter to your decisions, not just your own. If your opponent has already framed out the right side, extending your corner stone toward the middle of the board is usually more useful than extending toward a side they’ve already claimed. You’re not just building your own area; you’re deciding which parts of the board are still worth playing for.
Step 4: Watch your groups’ liberties
As stones fill the board, some of your groups will come under pressure from an opponent’s stones creeping around them, cutting off liberties. Check any group that’s getting surrounded: how many liberties does it actually have left, and can you add a stone to gain more (or connect it to a stronger group nearby) before it’s in real danger?
You don’t have to rescue every stone that comes under attack. Sometimes a stone or two is cheap to give up if saving it costs more than it’s worth. But a group with no way to make two eyes and no escape route is a group you’re about to lose, so it’s worth noticing early rather than late. The rules of Go covers what makes a group safe in the first place.
Step 5: Trade territory in the middle game
Once the corners and sides are staked out, the game moves into contact: your stones and your opponent’s stones touching, pushing against each other’s borders. This is where most of a game’s decisions happen, deciding whether to block, extend, connect, or sacrifice a few stones to gain something bigger elsewhere.
You won’t calculate this perfectly, and you don’t need to. A workable habit for a first game: play the move that either grows your area, shrinks your opponent’s, or saves a group in danger, roughly in that order of urgency when nothing dangerous is happening, and always defending danger first when it comes up.
Say your opponent pushes a stone up against one of your groups. Before answering automatically, count liberties on both sides: your group and theirs. If they have fewer liberties than you after the push, you may be able to ignore it, or even push back and put them in danger instead. Contact moves cut both ways. The player who reads one move further usually comes out ahead, and reading one move further is exactly the skill that improves fastest with practice.
Common early mistakes
A few habits sink far more beginner games than any lack of clever tactics:
- Chasing a single stone across the board. One weak stone usually isn’t worth spending five moves to save if your opponent gets five moves of profit elsewhere while you do it. Sometimes the right move is to let it go.
- Playing too close to your own strong stones. If a group already has two eyes or plenty of space, adding another stone right next to it usually does less than playing somewhere the board is still open.
- Ignoring a group with one eye. A group with only one eye isn’t safe yet, even if it looks settled. It needs a second eye or a connection to a stronger group before you can stop worrying about it.
- Forgetting to check liberties before a contact fight. Counting liberties on both sides for a few seconds before pushing into a fight avoids a lot of avoidable captures.
None of these are really about memorizing rules. They’re about pausing for a second before you play, which is a habit, not a fact you can just read once and keep.
Step 6: Fill the boundaries and finish
As the board fills in, the big open areas shrink down to boundary points: spots where your territory meets your opponent’s and someone has to play to settle exactly where the line falls. Playing these boundary points, and the small neutral points that belong to neither side (called dame), is the endgame.
Once every boundary is settled and neither player sees a move worth making, both players pass, one after the other, and the game is over. Under the area scoring this site uses, filling in dame actually gains you a point each time (unlike some rule sets, where neutral points don’t count at all), so it’s worth playing them out rather than passing early. How scoring works explains exactly why, and how a Go game ends covers passing and dead stones in detail.
Step 7: Count and see who won
When both players pass, you’ll agree on which stones (if any) are dead and can’t survive, then count territory and stones. How scoring works walks through a full count with diagrams. It’s simpler than it sounds, especially with the area scoring this site uses, where you’re mostly just counting up everything on your side of the board.
How to play Go on this site
Nothing to install and no account to make. Three steps:
- Open the board and pick a size. 9x9 is the right choice for a first game, and you can move up to 13x13 or 19x19 whenever it starts feeling small.
- Choose an opponent strength and click an intersection to place a stone. Illegal moves are refused rather than allowed by mistake, so suicide and ko are handled for you.
- Pass when you run out of useful moves. After two passes the board marks the dead stones, you correct anything it got wrong, and it counts the score with 7.5 komi.
If you would rather be walked through it, the interactive tutorial teaches the same material a move at a time on a real board, and checks each move as you make it.
Play, then come back
The fastest way to get comfortable with all of this is to just play. Try a 9x9 game against the computer on the easiest setting, lose a few times, and don’t worry about doing everything “correctly.” Every strong player started by making the same mistakes you’re about to make. Once you’ve played several games, strategy for beginners will make a lot more sense than it would right now, because you’ll recognize the situations it’s describing.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a game of Go take?
On a 9x9 board, twenty to thirty minutes for two beginners, and less once you stop agonising over each move. A 13x13 game runs around forty-five minutes, and a casual 19x19 game takes one to two hours. Tournament games with clocks are longer, and professional games at the top level are scheduled over a full day or even two, with hours of thinking time each.
What’s the best first move in Go?
A corner. On 19x19 the two standard choices are the 4-4 point, the star point, which favours outward influence, and the 3-4 point, which leans towards taking the corner territory outright. Neither is better than the other and strong players use both. On a 9x9 board the corner star points work well, and the centre point is genuinely playable there too, because the board is small enough for one central stone to reach everywhere.
How do you win at Go?
By controlling more of the board than your opponent when the game stops, not by capturing the most stones. Captures matter because of the space and strength they give you, not because prisoners are worth points here. The habits that win beginner games are taking corners early, answering urgent moves before big ones, and making sure your groups can live. Strategy for beginners puts them in order.
Is Go harder than chess?
The rules are simpler and the game is deeper. A Go board has 361 points and a typical position offers hundreds of legal moves, against roughly thirty in chess, which is why computers beat the best human chess players in 1997 but had to wait until 2016 to beat the best Go players. For a beginner, Go is the easier of the two to start: there is one kind of piece and it never moves. Go vs chess goes through the differences properly.