Games Played With Go Equipment

Many games can be played with Go equipment: a supply of white and black stones and a board with 19×19 intersections, other than Go and many more can be played with minor modification.

Games that can be played without modification on the intersections of a 19×19 Go board include:

  • Breakthrough, which can be played on just about any board shape one wishes
  • Gomoku, Ninuki-renju and its close relative Pente
  • Connect6, similar to naughts and crosses, but requires connecting six in a row, and with two stones per move
  • Irensei, uniting the seven in a row objective with the Go rules of capturing, suicide and Ko
  • Gonnect
  • Tanbo
  • Capture Go
  • Alea evangelii (game)

Games that can be played without modification on the intersections of a Go board reduced in size (perhaps by masking the unwanted sections with paper or tape) include:

  • Alak (1×19)
  • Five Field Kono (5x5)
  • Renju (15×15)
  • Philosopher's football (15×19)

Games that can be played without modification on the squares of a Go board reduced in size include:

  • Gess (18×18 squares—no reduction required)
  • Crossings (8×8 squares)
  • Epaminondas (12×14 squares)
  • Lines of Action (8×8 squares)
  • Reversi or Othello (8×8 squares up to 18 x 18 squares possible)
  • Connect Four (most commonly 7×6 squares)

It's also possible to use Go equipment as a low-tech interface to Conway's Game of Life; use black stones in the board's squares as 'pixels', and for each generation use white stones to indicate where new cells will be born. Then remove 'dead' black stones, replace the white stones with black ones to complete the new generation, and repeat the process.

Famous quotes containing the words games, played and/or equipment:

    At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.
    Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)

    ... the ... radio station played a Chopin polonaise. On all the following days news bulletins were prefaced by Chopin—preludes, etudes, waltzes, mazurkas. The war became for me a victory, known in advance, Chopin over Hitler.
    Margaret Anderson (1886–1973)

    Biological possibility and desire are not the same as biological need. Women have childbearing equipment. For them to choose not to use the equipment is no more blocking what is instinctive than it is for a man who, muscles or no, chooses not to be a weightlifter.
    Betty Rollin (b. 1936)