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:

    As long as lightly all their livelong sessions,
    Like a yardful of schoolboys out at recess
    Before their plays and games were organized,
    They yelling mix tag, hide-and-seek, hopscotch,
    And leapfrog in each other’s way all’s well.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    They played the eloquent tum-tum,
    And lived on scalps served up in rum—
    The only sauce they knew.
    Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)

    Why not draft executive and management brains to prepare and produce the equipment the $21-a-month draftee must use and forget this dollar-a-year tommyrot? Would we send an army into the field under a dollar-a-year General who had to be home Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays?
    Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)