File:THE GAME OF GO. (1910) - illustration - page 318.png

Caption: "THE GAME OF GO. Quote: Among the better classes, go is in greater vogue; it is much affected by retired old gentlemen, officials, school-teachers, and others of the professions. It is certainly more difficult and probably more scientific than the other. Go is played on a thick square board with heavy legs. The surface is marked with nineteen parallel lines crossed by as many similar lines, making the total number of points of intersection three hundred and sixty-one. The game is played on these points, and not in the squares formed by the parallel lines; and like shōgi, two persons take part in it. Either side has a box of round, flatfish pebbles small enough to be placed without overlapping on consecutive points. They are distinguished by colour; and the black is always given to the poorer player who opens the game, while the other takes the white. The object of the game is to take as many as possible of the enemy’s stones by surrounding them with one’s own. A stone once put on a point is immovable unless it is surrounded and taken off the board; it cannot move from one point to another. This siege of the enemy’s stone lies in cutting it off along the lines passing through the point it occupies. The siege is successful in its simplest form when a single stone is surrounded on the four adjacent points on the two lines intersecting at its point. There is no way of breaking the square formed by these four stones, for the only way in which relief can be brought to a threatened stone is to make it a part of a chain which cannot be completely surrounded by the enemy. When a stone is thus surrounded on all sides, it becomes a prisoner and is taken off the board. A stone at a corner of the board is imprisoned by two stones as there are no other adjacent points, and one on the edge by three stones. In a word, a stone cannot act diagonally, but must always work along a line. In practice, of course, it is usually a group of stones, rather than single stones, that find themselves prisoners, as the siege operations are more difficult to detect when carried out on a large scale. If it was only to surround the enemy and capture his stones, the game would be comparatively simple. It is complicated by the formation of vacant enclosures, within which if the enemy ventures, he must infallibly be captured. The object is to make these enclosures as large as possible, and since such camps, as they are called, would narrow the enemy’s field of operations, he does his best to break the cordon by intruding a chain of stones before it is completed. Hence, there are four operations going on at the same time: we must break up the enemy’s attempted cordon and surround his stones, and prevent his surrounding our stones and form our own cordons. This formation of camps, though really nothing more than a defensive measure, is in fact more important and difficult than the capture of the enemy’s stones; and the issue of the game depends generally more upon the size of these cordons than upon the number of prisoners actually taken. Though the game should theoretically be continued till the board is completely filled with stones, it is seldom pursued to that extent; for where there is a great inequality of skill, the issue can be seen long before the finish and the game given up, or where camps have been formed, the vacant space need not be filled in. In most cases, therefore, plenty of stones remain in hand. When the game is finished, the number if points enclosed by the camps, if any, is counted and reckoned as so many stones gained; and the difference between it and the number of prisoners in the enemy’s hands is one’s net gain or loss according as the former is greater or less than the latter. And the one with the larger net gain is naturally the winner.