No Contact Go

No Contact Go is arguably the simplest possible variant of Go.

It introduces students to the Go board, the stones, the alternation of moves, the adjacency of points, the option to pass, and to scoring, but avoids all the complexities of capturing. The rules are as follows:

1. No Contact Go is played on a square grid of points, by two players called Black and White.

2. Starting with an empty grid, the players alternate turns, starting with Black.

3. On their turn, a player either passes or places a stone of their color on an empty point while avoiding enemy contact, i.e. not orthogonally (horizontally or vertically) adjacent to any opponent stone.

5. The game ends after two consecutive passes.

6. A player's score is the number of their stones, plus the number of empty points adjacent to only their stones.

7. The player with the higher score at the end of the game is the winner. Equal scores result in a tie.

Optionally, some number of points ("komi") can be added to White's score to compensate for Black starting.

An even simpler variant removes the option of passing, and makes the player that has no legal move lose the game.