Variants
Table of contents |
This is a list of what can be done with a goban and stones, other than conventional Go.
Go Variants as Teaching Method
Historical or Regional Go Variants, Go with prescribed Openings
- Ancient Chinese Rules and Philosophy
- Sunjang Baduk
- Tibetan Go
- Influence Go
- Shape Game
- The Kill-all Game
- Dots Go
- Random start go, a.k.a. Wild Fuseki
- Other Prescribed Openings
- Pie Rule (an alternative to Nigiri)
- Pyjama Go (reviving a regular game of go after resignation)
- Sz'Kwa
- Historic Three-Color 10x10 Go at Matsumoto Castle
Simplified Variants
- AtariGo - Also known as the capture game or first capture
- Anti-Atari Go: First to capture loses. Just for fun.
- One-Eyed Go
- No-pass go [1]
- Gonnect: the rules of Go apply except that there is no passing and the winner is the first to connect two opposite sides of the board (or to deprive the opponent of legal moves). The game is usually played on a 13x13 board and the pie rule is used.
- Alter Igo - go-like game with minimalistic ruleset
- Reversi Go
- No-ko Go
- Paper And Pencil Go - A Go variant that can be played with just paper and pencil, while being as close to regular Go as possible. Gameplay is surprisingly interesting and even slightly more intuitive than regular Go.
-
Tochki (Points) - a well-known game in Russia (site in Russian).
Complicated Variants
-
Dango: Captured stones are not removed from the board. They are moved elsewhere on the board by the capturer!
- Bughouse Go like bughouse chess, but for go!
- Keima Go
- Hare Tortoise Go
- Gospiel, two players cannot see each others moves so referee is needed
- Progressive Go
Variants with different Scoring or with Bidding
- Button Go (not really a variant, just a refinement of area scoring)
- Environmental Go, also known as Token Go
- Bid Go
- Alternate Bid Go
- Take A Bet On Life And Death : a tsumego tournament
- Square Squared, based on *star.
- Gopposite, same rules as go, but try to score LESS than your opponent.
- Sunjang Baduk also has a variant kind of scoring
Games that model particular Aspects of Go
- Stacks of Coins
- Ko Threat Cards
- Zengo
- Gonte - the weaker player has the right to switch to white at one point during the game
- Superpower Go - one player has a superpower, the other has big komi. Can be used to evaluate the advantage of being komaster, for example.
Variants with Restrictions and Limitations
- Batoo
- Forbidden move game
- Forced Takeback Go
- Choice Go
- No Go
- Neurotic Go
- Sliding Go
- One Colour Go
- Phantom Go
- Relative go
- The proverb game
- Tenuki Go
- Fuseki Shuffle
- Non-contact go - Not allowed to play stones which would touch stones of the other player's colour.
- Three liberties go
- Dagger go
Spiced up Variants
- Buried Treasure
- Cards Go
- Electric Go
- Lottery Go
- Quantum Go - After an arbitrary number of moves, a random algorithm performs a change in status of some point
- Reuse Go
- Slidey Go
- Superpower Go one player has a superpower, the other has a komi. This is a whole family of variants, depending on the superpower.
Go on Different Boards
- N-go - played on N go boards, normal rules
- DoubleBoardGo
- Different Sized Boards
- Small Board Go
- Unusual Gobans
- Sz'Kwa
- Infinite Board
- Alak (1-dimensional)
- Representing 3-Dimensional Gobans on 2-D surfaces
- Playing 2-Dimensional Go on 3-D surfaces
- Playing Go in 3 Dimensions
- No Board
- Go On A Board Without Lines (now being implemented in software as FreeGo)
- Round boards
- NetGo
- Daoqi - The last line of the board wraps around to the first line, for both horizontal and vertical lines.
-
Livejournal Go community article on multi dimensional Go
- Topological Go - a highly generalized version allowing for many types of boards
- Beach Go
- TriGo
Go with Special Stones
Go for 3 or more Players
-
Four Color Go (There's no description - this just seems to be a sample game)
- Multi-color go
- NetGo
- Phantom Rengo with 3 Boards
- PoliticalGo
- Rengo
- Three Colour Ongoing Game
- Triangle Go
- Zen Go, also called three-player, two-colour go. Or something.
- TeamGo? was an experiment on DGS where a group of players would share the password of a normal user account. See
- "praat-go" (Dutch, lit. "talk-go") was ongoing at jijbent: A 5D
played against a team
discussing their moves. (see also Team Games In Server Go) - Note - for some timeout reason, the game was reset into a
new game. The experiment seems to have stalled.
Crossovers between Chess and Go
Other Surrounding Strategy Games
-
Cathedral - in its wooden edition a wonderfully haptic game
-
Othello aka Reversi
Other Games with Go Board and Stones
- Gomoku - Five in a row
- Pente - Like Gomoku, but with a way of capturing
-
Renju - Japanese variant of Gomoku, but with extra rules to give a fairer balance between black and white.
- Hasami Shogi
- Philosopher's Football - also known as Phutball. A wonderful game invented by John H. Conway. On first attempts it seems simple, but after thrashing around for a while you realise that advance preparation is required. Soon you are creating massively complex tours around the board, which can even end up self-defeating.
-
Tanbo (Tanbo crudely models a system of plant roots which are growing, competing for space, and dying. The object is to completely destroy your opponent.)
- Konane? - A traditional Hawaiian game somewhat resembling checkers or draughts. Although there is no standard board size, various web references say it is often played on an 18x18 board, i.e., on the squares of a go board. The game begins with the board filled with stones alternating black-white. The first player (black) then removes a stone from either the center or corner. White must then remove an adjacent stone. Then the game proceeds with black jumping over a white stone, landing on the open square immediately beyond it, and removing the white stone. White must then re-capture then same way. Only capturing moves are legal. A player may (but doesn't have to) capture multiple stones in a straight line (no 90-degree turn) when such stones are lined up with one empty space in between. The object of the game is not to capture the most stones, but to deprive your opponent of legal moves.
- Connect Four - On IYT this is called
stack4. IYT has also invented a variant called
stack 4x4, which is basically the same (i.e. the object is still to get 4 of your counters in a row - horizontally, vertically or diagonally), the difference is that counters can connect to any of the 4 sides, as opposed to just the bottom side. Stack4 and stack 4x4 can be played on the squares of a 9x9 board.
- Connect 6 - On littlegolem - Black starts by playing a stone at tengen. After this each player plays 2 stones on their turn. The first to make a line of 6 stones (horizontally, vertically or diagonally) wins the game.
- Irensei - objective is to line up 7 stones, uses Go capturing, suicide and Ko rules
-
Conway's Game of Life
Other Go-related Games
-
Penta Go - a hybrid between Go and Monopoly
- Hex
- The Glass Bead Game - fictional game by Hermann Hesse
- Merrills
- Fjorde
Go Variants Collections
- a lot of
Variations on Go (other rules, other boards, other pieces, other players) at Joćo Pedro Neto's
World of Abstract Games
Don't know where to put it, might just be regular 9x9 go
- KlinGo
- one-player go?
- a player generates several boards. the idea is to present those boards to the player after applying a color swap and some geometric transformation (mirroring, rotation), in an attempt to thwart the player's memory. so in fact a player plays both sides (against him/herself). this doesn't make much sense if only one board is involved, so at least two boards are needed, but several boards is better.
Willemien 0n the page CGT Values Of Eyes Bill mentions the go variant bargo?, "a go-like game which is scored by the number of Black eyes of a group. The final scores are 0, 1, 2, and S. S stands for seki, and an integral number of eyes more than 2 are scored as 2. Does anybody has more info on this?
[1] Robert Pauli: Hmm... actually pretty much normal go: rules simplified, but not the game.