Atari Go

  Difficulty: Beginner   Keywords: Variant

Chinese: 吃子棋 (Chīzǐqí)
Japanese: ふれあい囲碁 (Fureai igo)

AtariGo, aka, first-capture go, the capture game, or Ponnuki-Go is a variant of Go. The first to capture any stones wins the game.

This game can be played with pen and paper, since there is never any need to erase captured stones.

A related variant is for the goal to be the first to capture 5 or 10 stones. This is suggested as a teaching method to transition from Capture Go to regular Go.

See also

Book recommendation

External links


fool: Aside from the teaching method, I'm interested in what happens, mathematically, as we go from capture the first stone, to capture N stones, as N gets larger. As N gets very large, it seems to be equivalent to regular go with GroupTax. (Assuming PassStones, I mean. Eventually they just stop playing and keep giving stones to each other until N is reached. For Komi, you can start the game with black giving white a certain number of prisoners.) But there is one difference with SuperKo rule. If neither player can afford to give up the super ko as is, they loop until they approach N, and then the game is changed. So mathematically, there is no need to keep track of all previous board states. (We could also get rid of basic ko rule, but that is a big change, whereas superko is so rare anyway.) I'm also curious how big N has to be for it to be 'almost' the same as regular go.


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