Variants

Three color go allows three players on one board
Much can be done with a goban and stones, other than conventional Go.
Many intriguing games result from Go-like rules which may even directly benefit Go skill.
Inventors have developed a dazzling variety of games with rules similar to Go in intuitiveness, wording, territorial objective, simplicity etc. And the results often bear comparison with or even challenge Go in beauty, entertainment value, difficulty and complexity.
Table of contents |
Historical Variants
Simpler variants
- Atari Go - Also known as the capture game or first capture
- Snorkels - a form of child friendly AtariGo
- Stacks of Coins - a very simple model of the endgame
Non-Variants
Differing presentations, quantities, or definitions of current-day Go
- One Colour Go
- No Board
- VertiGo - an alternative tactile presentation
- Simul Go - many games at once
- Triangle - arrangement for 3 players to play one another in 3 games
- Different Sized Boards and Small Board Go
See also: standard rule sets and refinements of rule sets which (by design) do not Usually alter the normal course of play. This includes several systems of scoring.
White to live
Games that practice life making and all-or-nothing attack
- In the corner surrounded by black stones on the 8th, 9th or 10th lines.
- The Shape Game - sabaki on a board with black edges
- The Kill-all Game - how many stones to own the whole board? Roughly 17.
- Pieboxing - variant placing black stones in a fair way before White tries to live
- The Nine Handicap Challenge - educational game position about where there is room for groups
- Tsumego
Special set-up
- Dots
- "Influence" variant
- Experimental handicaps (such as a
ponnuki)
- Wild Fuseki, Random start go, Fuseki shuffle and other prescribed openings
- see also historical variants
Educational variants with teams or possible switching of players
- Rengo - pair go
- Big Brother Go - a teammate may adjust a weaker player's moves, at some cost. A similar penalty can be added to rengo.
- Zengo - three players who alternately play both black and white
- PyjamaGo - reviving a regular game of go after resignation
- Gonte - the weaker player has the right to switch to white, once per game
- Go Back - at any time, the game may be reverted to before the losing move and played out again, etc.
- Malkovich Game - another meta-game idea
- Team Go - an experiment on DGS where a group of players would share an account. Records of 'team go' remain on the forums there.
- "praat-go" (Dutch, lit. "talk-go") was ongoing at jijbent: A 5D played against a team
discussing their moves.
Variants restricting valid moves
- The proverb game
- Tenuki Go - may not play near (adjacent to) last move
- The (other) Shape Game - must attempt to play a shape move near a stone of either color
- Neurotic Go
- Non-contact - forbids touching stones of the other player's colour.
- Three Liberties
Different Boards
- Unusual Gobans - SL accumulation including software links at bottom of page
- N-go - normal Go played on N boards
- Round board
- TriGo - variant of Go on a triangular (aka hexagonal) lattice, two stones placed at a time
- Representing 3-Dimensional Gobans on 2-D surfaces
- Daoqi - a toroidal Go variant
- Playing 2-Dimensional Go on 3-D surfaces
- Playing Go in 3 Dimensions
- General Graph Go - mathematical rules for Go on any graph
- Infinite Board - discussion
- Go on a board without lines - see the discussion page too
- Euclidean Go - stones as circles in a plane
- Beach Go - proposed variant
- Topological Go - further generalization
- Double Board Go - attaching a second, mirror-like board
-
Other boards - another variants compendium including alternative grids
Alternative rules of capture, suicide, repetition, and fairness
Modified wording of how movement/capture occurs
- One-Eyed Go - requires one or more liberties at all times
- Simultaneous Capture - zero liberties at any time results in removal
- Self-capture - rules forbidding self-capture are common, but this is extraneous to many intuitive formulations of Go
Variants eliminating ko fights; (for many other ko rules browse for ko rules)
- No-ko Go - forbidding ko one move in advance
- Geneva Ko Rule - neutralizing ko shapes using a deterrent for repetition
Making a game equitable without resorting to komi
- Pie Rule - common variant tool/rule used in place of komi
- (Free) Handicaps - moves as compensation
- F-Go (Fair Go) - unique Go variant where players move simultaneously
Go adding special stones or abilities
- Redstone - simplified variant where stones played to capture are red (neutral and immune to capture)
- Superpower Go - a family of variants where one player has a superpower, the other has big komi. (This often involves breaking an aspect of Go and observing the effect.)
- example: evaluating the advantage of being komaster
- Dagger Go
- Special Stones
- Choice Go as handicap
- Games where both players have a special power:
- Tao Go
- Choice Go, Forced Takeback Go (No Go), and Forbidden Move Game
See also Other Pieces - many listed variants that mostly fall in the Superpower category
Modeling or illustrating a particular aspect of Go
- Card Game Model of Ko
- Combinatorial Game Theory - math can convert between Go endgames and positions in many other (combinatorial) games
Go with Different Stones
Variants that use a different set of stones, or with a normal turn other than "place one stone."
- DominGo - pieces are domino shaped
- Keima Go - pieces are another two-stone shape
- Double Go - placing two stones per turn
See also Other Pieces For extra stones with special effects, see Superpower Go, above.
Variants with an uneven number of moves
- Hare Tortoise - white has double moves vs. massive handicap
- Progressive Go - increasing number of stones played each turn
Limited information or visibility
- Batoo - a battle including an initial placement of 3 stones, one hidden stone each, score bonuses, and other elements
- Hidden Move Go - a few stones that opponents cannot see
- Phantom Go (Gospiel) - based on blindfold chess; most moves are invisible
- Phantom Rengo with 3 Boards - augmented Gospiel
- Relative Go - unique idea obscuring the location of the edges
- Buried Treasure - hidden score bonuses
Variants with 3 or more players
- Multi-color go - adding a third player, Red, and perhaps others
- Example game of 3 color Go
-
Other players - cooperation and move order in multiplayer Go variants
- Players as stones
- Other political variants
Variants with different Scoring or with Bidding
- Environmental Go - also known as Coupon or Token Go
- Bid Go - bidding for the right to play
- Alternate Bid Go
- Volcano Variant - "irregular scoring," for example placing greater emphasis on the center
- Take A Bet On Life And Death - a tsumego tournament
- Square Squared, based on *star, counting stones on the edge plus a group tax
See also Scoring and under historical variants.
Miscellaneous results of simplifying standard Go
- Alter Igo - go-like game with minimalistic ruleset
- No-pass go - a component of formulating the rules for Mathematical Go
Games involving Territory, Surrounding, and/or Connection
Go-like games with no capture:
- Symple - a quicker game involving when and where to start and connect groups, in order to grow to cover the most area, minus a group tax
- Fjorde - German-style board game with an element of enclosure
Go-like games with Othelloanian Capture (captured pieces reverse color, which removes the possibility of repeating cycles (ko)):
- Sygo - shorter, challenging Go-style game created with the Symple move protocol and its unique balancing mechanism
- Loose - finite Go variant with modified (looser) capture
- Reversi Go - simplest hybrid of
Reversi (Othello) and Go
- Medusa - game of abstract strategy concocted starting from Go on a partial hex grid
- Lotus - a more minimal support act for Medusa
Games playable with paper and pencil:
-
Tochki (Points or
Dots) - a well-known game in Russia.
- Paper And Pencil Go - dead stones marked, not removed
Other abstract strategy games with Go-like equipment and themes:
- Orbit - Go variant based on encirclement (rather than adjacent encirclement)
- Tanbo - Tanbo crudely models a system of plant roots which are growing, competing for space, and dying.
Variants with mobile stones
- Reuse Go - moving a stone substituting for a turn
- Slidey Go - a minor permission for moving stones
- Sliding Go - surrounding game where moves have a path to a player's edge
- Dango (no page, link is to namesake) - captured stones are moved elsewhere by the capturer.
Variants adding complicated rules
- Batoo - a battle including set-up phase, hidden moves, komi bidding, and scoring bonuses
- Electric Go - a unique effect alters the board with each stone placed
Spiced up variants
Games that add an element of luck, subjectivity or manual dexterity
- Go with Cheating
-
Dango (aka Cards Go) - game developed by A. Dinerchtein
- Bughouse Go - bughouse chess adapted to go
- Lottery Go - players use mostly stones of their own color
- Quantum Go - after an arbitrary number of moves, a random algorithm performs a change in status of some point
- Under The Stones Fuseki
- Frisbee Go
Special objective
- Irensei - the aim is to line up 7 stones, uses Go capturing, suicide and ko rules
- Gonnect a child of Go and Hex
- Gopposite - try to score LESS than your opponent
- Anti-Atari Go - First to capture loses. Just for fun.
See also Tsumego Conventions,
Cousins of Go
- Alak - black and white pieces on a one dimensional line
- Bargo - (mentioned here) scored by the number of Black eyes of a group
- Dominions - played with hexagonal tiles with different arrangements of 1 to 6 liberties
- Go in fiction - occasionally someone imagines a fictional game that is partly inspired by Go.
Other Games with Go Board and Stones
- Gomoku - Five in a row
- Pente - Like Gomoku, but with a way of capturing
-
Renju - variant of Gomoku, but with extra rules to give a fairer balance between black and white.
- Connect 6 - Black starts with a stone at tengen. Then white, and two stones per turn. 6 stones in a row wins (any direction)
- Hasami Shogi
-
Conway's Game of Life - really a toy or simulation, famous for its surprising complexity
- Philosopher's Football (Phutball) - An actual wonderful game invented by John H. Conway
-
Konane - A traditional Hawaiian game somewhat resembling checkers or draughts, said to be fit for the 18x18 squares on a Go board
-
Ming Mang (also Mig Mang) - a general Tibetan term for game, sometimes Go, but the linked game is something different.
Another source allows multiple captures. Ming Mang naturally generalises to
Gundru
- The Flicky Game - one of probably many Korean? stone-sliding dexterity games
Other games
- Chess
- Merrills or Nine Men's Morris
- Hex
- Havannah - variant of Hex with different winning conditions
-
Cathedral - territorial -ominoes game. In its wooden edition, wonderfully haptic.
- Connect Four - On IYT this is called
stack4. IYT has also invented a variant called
stack 4x4
Crossovers between Chess and Go
-
Go with chess pieces - stones that connect in ways that chess pieces can move (a way to generalize Go)
-
Gess - chess-like game with mutable "pieces" (3x3 shapes made of stones)
-
CheGo - dropping chess-type pieces with the objective of controlling board squares.
-
Amazons - another instance of a territorial/surrounding objective added to a chess-like setting
Other Go Variants Collections
-
Variations on Go - large listing (other rules, other boards, other pieces, other players) at Joćo Pedro Neto's
World of Abstract Games
- Go Variants as Teaching Method