The project is currently crowdfunding on the Japanese platform CAMPFIRE until September 30. It hit its target within four hours of launching and is now at nearly 500%: https://camp-fire.jp/projects/949683/view.

Hi, I am very new to go and I have a question. A cursory google search did not answer my question, and I thought I would ask you kind people! I hope I am not breaking some rule by creating a post for this, I didn't see a small questions thread.

The basis of the question is that people say Japanese and Chinese scoring are equivalent, but also that placing a stone inside your territory is losing a point in Japanese scoring. So could you lose a game by playing with Japanese scoring by placing stones well inside your territory, and your opponent refrains from doing so? And would a Chinese scoring of the same game have a different outcome?

Also, I was playing a 9x9 game on OGS against one of the easiest AIs (I'm determined to eventually beat this particular AI!), and it seemed to place his stone well inside its own territory for no benefit near the end of the game. As far as I can tell, the game was scored with Chinese rules, so maybe it was aware of this and that is why it made this move.

So my basic question is: are you penalising yourself by playing a non-essential move inside your territory in Japanese scoring? Is it just that more experienced players don't make these moves that make the scoring schemes equivalent?

I know this is a fairly basic question, please be gentle!

The game is designed for players who already know the rules of Go and may have experience playing on smaller boards, but are unsure what to think about when playing on a full 19×19 board.

Hibiki Mishima, a professional Go player affiliated with the Kansai Ki-in and widely known in Japan as “the exceptionally beautiful professional Go player,” and Kanon Uemura, a 5-dan amateur Go instructor, teach players how to approach the 19×19 board through dialogue-based lessons featuring character portraits and interactive board demonstrations.

In addition to reading through the lessons, players answer questions by selecting points on the board and put what they have learned into practice through AI-powered matches. These interactive features allow players to develop a deeper understanding of 19×19 Go in an approachable, game-like format.

The Steam store page features an overview of the game, screenshots, and a promotional trailer. Players can now add the game to their Steam wishlists ahead of its upcoming release.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5145860/19/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=wishlist

After all the advice and some vids i watched im starting to get a grasp on 19x19. Many mistakes made but i beat someone rated much higher. (im black)

Hi ! I've been looking for a while now, but I can't find anything that works offline and i can use simply.

I thought it would be easy to find, I don't need AI review or anything, just an app working offline that can export the game to a common format like sgf.

I'm on Android btw

As the title suggests, Korean Joseon-era Go boards were unlike anything we know of in the Go community today. While modern high-end gobans are made from a solid block of wood, Joseon-era gobans were crafted out of boards of wood joined together, leaving a hollow chamber beneath the playing surface. Sometimes this space was simply covered leaving a tiny hole for sound to resonate outwards, but other times an elaborate network of wires was strung along the inside of the chamber. These wires made a distinct sound when stones were played, turning a game of Go into a musical experience. Although I was unable to find an example of this sound being played on an authentic Joseon-era Go board, in Stewart Culin's 1895 book 'Games of the Orient', he states they produced an "F, first space, treble clef, of the European scale".

Unfortunately, these boards fell out of favor during the Japanese colonial period. Today, surviving examples of these gobans are held in museums and private collections, with many artifacts dating back to the 1800s. Although it is unlikely they will ever achieve the popularity of their heyday, a revival is not unlikely. During my research I came across Yoo Jin-kyung (유진경 씨), a craftsman working to preserve and promote traditional Korean gobans. She extensively researched Joseon-era Go boards and has attempted to carefully reconstruct them with traditional woodworking tools. If you are interested in these wired gobans, I would highly recommend visiting her workshop website and watching an interview she did with OBS. Unfortunately, her interview is only available in Korean, but it’s still worth a watch because in it she demonstrates the sound produced by one of her wired gobans when a stone is played.

The x-ray image above was taken by Curator Park Sung-hee (박성희가) of the National Folk Museum of Korea during conservation work on one of their artifacts (Relic No: 002244). This was the only internal picture I could find of a wired Joseon-era Go board. It highlights some of the complexity of their internal workings, but it is still quite difficult to make out some of the details. The other pictures above show some other sides of the same board. I was able to reach out Park Sung-hee and ask some questions about how these boards worked, and they told me:

"As can be seen in the X-ray image, the metal wire is not secured with metal nails or similar fasteners. Instead, holes were drilled through the wooden rods (secured with wooden nails) positioned above and below the bend in the metal wire to connect the long wire and secure it at the same time. Five small wooden rods on the front side of each of the long wooden rods above and below are arranged to lift the metal wire into the air, allowing it to resonate."

I wrote an article going deeper into the workings of wired Joseon-era Go boards as well as my discussions with Curator Park Sung-hee, and posted it to my substack, Classical Board Games Review. In this newsletter, I’ll be exploring the history and culture of classical board games like Go, Chess, Checkers, etc. If you’d like to check it out and read this article (all my articles will be free), here’s the link:

https://classicalboardgames.substack.com/p/the-hidden-music-of-korean-go-boards

Although I would really appreciate readers and subscribers, if you’d just like to learn more about wired Joseon-era Go boards, here are the sources for the above pictures and further information:

National Folk Museum of Korea (I'm unable to link directly to specific artifacts, but if you navigate to their digital collection and search for gobans, you'll find many examples of these Go boards along with the board pictured above, Relic No: 002244)

Curator Park Sung-hee's article on Relic No: 002244 (in this article, they detail the conservation efforts made on the board and highlight some of its cultural context)

CyberOro’s interview of Yoo Jin-kyung (in this article, Yoo Jin-kyung details her discovery of wired Joseon-era Go boards as well as how she came to recreate them)

Yoo Jin-kyung's OBS interview (in this video, Yoo Jin-kyung explains her work on traditional Korean gobans and demonstrates the sounds it produces)

ETA: If you're curious about the unusual star points featured on these boards, you can check out my previous article on star point designs here:

https://classicalboardgames.substack.com/p/some-historic-star-point-designs

Hello again!

Unfortunately, I couldn't attend the European and US Go Congresses this year.

So, I've decided to share the lecture I originally planned to give there online! It's called "Feel the Aji!"

It will be streaming on my YouTube channel, "Yunguseng Dojang," this Thursday, September 3rd at 21:00 CEST / 15:00 EDT.

Please check out the link below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ_7G10LOxI

Hey everyone,

A friend of mine got a fan with go seigen signature from nihon kin.

Does anyone know of an online shop that sells fans signed by go players?

In the picture, Black has quite a large territory on the side, because most stones are on the forth line (at least on the top half of the board).

Is it still possible to invade as White and live around the green marking? I don’t mind if small or just barely. My intuition says it is a bit too lose for black to just keep EVERYTHING.
Also if 3-3 works, I don’t really see the follow up…an example variation would be greatly appreciated.

On the other side, maybe it was bad play by White that gave Black too much. Would be interesting to know your ideas!

新しい囲碁ソフトウェアを紹介します。

https://github.com/nadesico19/gotepad/blob/main/README.ja.md

https://github.com/nadesico19/gotepad/blob/main/README.en.md

Gotepad is a cross-platform client for recording Go games, reviewing positions, and organizing game records. 

Main features:

Full Go board interaction: play and capture stones, undo moves, place and edit setup stones, switch the move color, prevent accidental taps, and lock board operations.

Multi-branch game-record management: navigate and play through a game, find stones, reorder or delete next-move branches, retain only the main line, and browse the complete variation tree as board thumbnails.

Variation exploration: create a temporary variation from any position, browse or roll back its moves, and choose whether to keep or discard it.

SGF reading and writing: load records from local files, the system clipboard, or the operating system's Open With action. Supports game metadata, setup nodes, branches, position titles, comments, common board marks, and Gotepad custom data, with defensive validation and warnings for malformed SGF files.

Game notes: store multiple layers of notes for one position; add sequential letters, triangles, squares, circles, and crosses; and configure different move-numbering modes for reading and publication. Focus mode browses every note linearly in publication-export order and allows direct editing while browsing.

Create positions from images: select a local image on Windows, or take a photo or choose one from the gallery on Android. OpenCV detects the board and black and white stones, after which users can rotate the image, correct its four corners, run recognition again, and manually correct individual intersections.

KataGo analysis: single-position and continuous analysis, candidate moves and variations, additional board candidates, win-rate and score-lead curves, fast full-game analysis, increased search effort, and warnings for inferior played moves. Windows uses an externally deployed engine; Android includes OpenCL and Eigen backends and a built-in model, while also allowing an external model to be imported.

KataGo human-like play: choose whether the AI plays Black or White, select a modern or pre-AlphaGo style, playing strength, and search effort per move, then start a game from any position in the current record. Temporary games support takeback and can either be retained in the original record or discarded.

Final scoring: under Chinese rules, use KataGo to determine ownership at every intersection, manually correct connected ownership regions, and report stones plus territory, komi, and the final margin for both sides.

PPTX publication export: lay out selected boards, move numbers, marks, and notes as an editable B5 landscape slide deck. Board images can be exported as SVG vectors or compatibility-oriented PNG files; Android currently supports SVG only.

Multiple documents and a customizable interface: tabs, new, save, save as, texture selection, move-number display, stone-sound volume, board width, UI scaling, and mobile safe-margin settings.

Cross-platform interaction: Windows x64 and Android arm64-v8a are supported. Android adds touch zoom and panning, a large-UI option, landscape-orientation following, and opening SGF files from the system file manager.

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English interface languages.

Update checking: check GitHub Releases for the current platform and stable/test channel, display notes for up to the five newest applicable versions, and open either the GitHub or cloud-drive download page in the system browser.

SGF saves use a temporary backup to reduce the risk of damaging the original file if an overwrite fails.

This is not the final position but it played out into a seki for the left side groups (two liberties each). Is there a sequence from this position that ends in a capture? I haven't played enough of these scenarios out to spot how either player could take advantage of the multiple ko's. I can't recall who's turn it is here.

Chess.com has created a poker server called Gambit, and said they plan to expand to other classic games, including Go.

From The Verge article (paywalled):

Rating systems are also at the heart of Chess’s next move. Chess.com is now looking to expand into even more classic games, including go, backgammon, and mahjong. Like Gambit, Chess.com is developing Elo-style rating systems for these games, as well. Cheng didn’t say when the new sites will launch but that “development is moving quite rapidly” on them, using the same playbook he used for Gambit.

AI is a key reason Chess.com was finally able to expand into other games after nearly 20 years, according to Cheng. He and one other employee took Gambit from prototype to launch within a year, partly with help from AI, mainly for coding tasks. “I think the biggest advantage that it’s provided is essentially being able to read our existing codebase and our design system and apply consistent patterns to how we develop Chess.com over to a different platform and do so quickly,” Cheng said.

Hey everyone, just curious if there is a place a foreigner could learn some Go in Japan.

Happy to give some chess lessons as a sort of cultural exchange :D

Or do you just read the life and death while playing?

I played Black in this game. My opponent played H3, and I was trying to stop him from making a base. He then tried to run, and I was attempting to prevent that. A fight broke out, and I almost died—but he didn't play correctly, so I managed to live. Still, I couldn't stop him from connecting. After that, everything was a mess; I kept making blunders and lost miserably.

While reviewing it I thought of H5 I could stop him from running while protecting my cutting point and potentially trying to make a moyo in the centre.

So my question is: what was the better move?

Hi r/baduk! mods, remove if this isn't a fit. 😭

I built a Connect Six app for Android. It's not Go, but it's the same board and stones, and the reason it exists might interest this sub: gomoku's first-player advantage needs forbidden moves and swap rules to patch, while Connect Six fixes it with one line - black opens with a single stone, then both sides place two per turn.

Would love any feedback! The AI, the board sizes, how it feels to play.

You can try it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.isaac.connectsix&referrer=utm_source%3Dreddit%26utm_medium%3Dpost%26utm_campaign%3Dbaduk

I bought the stone size set with stones sized 30 to 42 to compare them and see how the larger stones felt. I made them wobble and as you can see the larger size wobbles more. Interestingly the black wobbles more than the white.

China: Liao Yuanhe, Ding Hao, Wang Xinghao, Dang Yifei, Yang Kaiwen, Zhou Hongyu, Yang Dingxin, Xie Ke, Fan Yin, Shi Yue, Tan Xiao, Xia Chenkun, Gu Zihao, Zhao Chenyu, Lian Xiao, Wang Shuo, Jiang Weijie, Li Qincheng, Tu Jikang

South Korea: Shin Jinseo, Park Junghwan, Shin Minjun, Byun Sangil, Kang Dongyun, Kim Myounghoon, Mok Jinseok

Japan: Shibano Toramaru, Fukuoka Kotaro

Chinese Taipei: Xu Haohong

Singapore: Xu Xiaofan

PS: The organizers can still invite two wildcard players.

GENERAL SPECIFICATION

• Title: Let's Master AI Joseki
• Author: Cho Seok-Bin
• Publisher: LABO-K Gakuen
• Edition: 2026-08-23
• Language: English
• Price: EUR 23.05
• Contents: joseki
• ISBN: 9798193807803
• Printing: almost intermediate
• Layout: almost intermediate
• Editing: almost intermediate
• Pages: 201
• Size: 150mm x 227mm
• Diagrams per Page on Average: 2
• Method of Teaching: selected examples
• Read when EGF: 5k - 3d
• Subjective Rank Improvement: -
• Subjective Topic Coverage: --
• Subjective Aims' Achievement: +

CONTENTS

The book Let's Master AI Joseki studies a selection of 23 AI-influenced josekis, a few variations for each and altogether 8 problems in an extra concluding chapter. 7 chapters study the 3-4, 8 study the 4-4 or the 3-3 invasion under 4-4, 4 study reductions of corner enclosures, and 4 study joseki developments on one side of the board or a related initial shape. The selection focuses on practically relevant josekis but also touches a modest number of intermediate tactical complications as a warning of existing deeper waters. Every chapter shows a small number of josekis, alternative variations, possibly follow-ups or failures. The book emphasises brief discussion as an easier source of memorisation, but avoids completion and loss in otherwise increasingly growing detail.

Although the book describes everything as originating from AI, the reviewer recognises some earlier human joseki knowledge. The book does not state anything about the used degree of confidence of the AI search but mentions five professional cooperators. As the reviewer, I judge the diagram sequences correct due to having seen some before in my own AI study or other earlier available AI knowledge, agreeing to my understanding of go theory or rechecking a few results by AI. For only move 11 in the one diagram 17-1-5, my objection is that the author has neglected the essentially equally good alternative E6 - F4 to be follow-up by C8. Apparently, the author presumes a loss tolerance of less than 1 point to declare an even position while I prefer to apply a significantly tighter view.

The author is on the optimistic side when associating AI with thinking, objectivity and strategic concepts. His pessimism shows when expecting readers to learn mainly from intuition, memory and extraction from sampling. Shouldn't he rather paint AI less superficial and players somewhat more capable? The author mentions AI's most prominent skills of global efficiency and long-term planning but the book falls short in explaining these. Instead, it extracts merely four ordinary techniques in its final chapter.

CIRCUMSTANCES

AI coverage is still underwhelming so we might welcome every addition to the bookshelf. This book, however, also has its shortcomings. The paper is just acceptable but the printed colour is a bit sparse. Together with the small diagrams and thin font of numbers on the stones, being short-sighted or having weak lighting can be significant hurdles especially for deciphering the black stones.

The overall structure of the layout is rather consistent. However, the layout tries to apply every layout element while forgetting that layout would be fine if it is not even noticed or obviously very good at a glance. Some layout details are inconsistent or sins, such as sudden changes of font sizes or hiding contents behind invisible masks. Apart from binding and pagination, some 45% of the space is wasted on page borders and ornaments. As a consequence, the main font and diagrams are too small.

Without spelling mistakes and almost always correctly edited diagrams, the editing earns its 'almost intermediate' level. Everything else about the editing demands a few days of additional proofreading and an immediate second print run. Besides white spaces and very much duplication in the problems chapter, everything has been done to inflate the number of pages from 100 to 201. Many diagrams repeat move numbers. With just one added new move, such a diagram becomes superfluous. With many added new moves, the repeated move numbers make reading the diagram unnecessarily difficult. All diagrams are 19x19 but many could have shown just one side or quarter of the board. The texts contain many mistakes: awkward style; wrongly described contents; wrong colours, directions or references; wrong go terms. The reader might consider to skip all explanations and focus on the correct diagrams.

CONCLUSION

The book's strength is emphasis on flexible thinking. Its weakness is the small scope of new theory derived from AI play.

The cover recommends readers from 5k to 7d. I suggest the core readership from 5k to 3d. A 5d might learn something from roughly one fifth of the diagrams and a 7d would learn less. The wider recommendation is not false but high dans would only seek this book to appreciate any source on AI available, as long as AI offers much more than has already been explained. Everybody else can learn more from the diagrams and buy the book for the same reason without fear of any conflict with the other AI joseki selection '100 AI Joseki' or a pure AI joseki dictionary. However, awaiting a then carefully edited second edition is a strong, optimistic option. Besides, I would wish it to receive a more convenient layout and twice the amount of contents in its format with a then justified price. --robert jasiek