Stones FAQ

in Go, you are free to Pass, effectively skipping your turn. In Stones, you must make a Legal Move and simply not playing is not an option. Prisoner Return and Group Staking preserve the necessary functions that removing the option to ‘pass’ affects.

in Go, players end the game by Passing and agreeing upon the status of groups, the counting the result. In Stones, there is no Passing. Staking and Prisoner Exchange fill in the biggest gaps created from removing Passing. The tradeoff is there is no uncertainty, no ability to incorrectly decide a winner by not properly applying higher concepts, no confusion of how to continue if there is a disagreement – things that weigh heavily on new players for a while.
Players do not need to guess when it is time to do final steps. You could pass at any random time in Go, and with poor understanding, both players might pass incorrectly and be unsure how to score the game. With Stones, this cannot happen! You can only use Staking and Prisoner Return when it is needed and are incentivized directly to use them when you have the option.

In all but a few lesser used rule-sets, Go does not allow self-capture. Stones allows self-capture as long as the result does not create an Illegal Move by repeating a Board Position. In our summation, there is no need to ban self-capture! It does not solve any issue as a rule and is more a matter of tradition. Self-capture is usually its own punishment and there are a few extremely rare circumstances where it can be tactical.

Usually, the winner of Stones is going to be the winner of Go, and if you stopped playing by one set of rules and started playing by the other in the middle of the game, you would make no changes until the very end, and the same player would win both ways. However, there are situations where you could win Stones but lose by Go rules if you continued, or be forced to play differently than you would if you were playing Go. Some examples are listed below. They require understanding of Go to fully appreciate, at which point Stones has fulfilled its duty. These examples also disappear if one were to play with a higher than default Lead Threshold.

• Sacrificing a large group or groups to create a winning Go situation, but doing so would trigger your opponent reaching their Lead Threshold first
• Removing internal Liberties of a “dead” group could cause your opponent to reach the Lead Threshold before you can recapture
• Endgame in Stones allows for Liberty inefficiency situations that don’t happen in Go and could alter the outcome by a point/stone or two. These almost entirely go away with proper play, but it is unique to Stones to have to play this out properly.
• A capture race might be forced to be played early in Stones that one would wait to play in Go, thus altering the game, what the correct move would be between the games, and the potential winner.

Staking accounts for what is effectively a Group Tax , which Go no longer uses. Simply put, without it, you are punished for having more groups than your opponent, all else being equal. So using this rule puts the outcome more in line with modern Go. If you play without it, that’s fine, you’re just playing like they did thousands of years ago!

Both players can Stake the same Liberty if they share it.

Yes, as long as all groups have 2 Liberties. But there is no advantage to doing this, as Stake stones are captured along with the Group of the Staked Liberty. They will just lose an additional Stone as if they had played there!

Yes, if it results in satisfying the Lead Threshold. Since Stake stones are captured along with their associated Group, a single Stone with a Stake being captured results in 2 captures. This fulfills the “Capture 2 or more Stones” requirement, even though one of them is a Stake stone!

Lots of times, nothing! Especially for players that are highly motivated, want to dig right in, invest time, and learn.

Stones is directly inspired by other projects that have had similar aims, and is informed by the whole history of Go rules and gameplay to tell a story of how they relate and how the various ways of viewing the ‘goal’ of Go are related. We support them! This project just aims to improve upon them.

Atari Go/Capture Go , for instance, is a common ‘tutorial’ version of Go that is taught and functions great for teaching beginners the mechanics of play. Its weakness is, in practice, it is not seen as ‘real Go’ and is abandoned when it fulfills this role.
If you expand the Capture threshold sufficiently high and add the option to Pass, Capture Go becomes identical to JunGo (Pure Go) or Stone Scoring, which reduces the goal of Go to simply ‘who can put the most stones on the board’ – probably one of the original forms of the game according to Ancient Rules. They differ from modern Go by not really having a way to implement komi and either require Group Tax as a rule or differ from the results of Go by Group Tax.
Nordic Go’s Beginner’s Guide also teaches this method, but simplifies Ko and suicide in a similar manner to Stones (obviously things we view as improvements).
Passing to end the game will always be problematic, especially if one is trying to learn a game unassisted with a simple rulebook or one runs into an unruly opponent who seeks to abuse the mechanic to waste time. Knowing when to pass is a permanent beginner barrier, begging the question of “how do I know the game is done” to the subject.
Trying to visualize the goal of “putting more stones on the board” is also difficult, and therefore not informative and difficult to actualize. The only way to put more stones on the board is to capture stones if the board is to fill up.
Stones seeks to fix this by giving a clear goal that can be visualized and quickly demonstrated directly, without need of agreement.
Stones also builds a transitional bridge for komi and group tax. As a result, when you expand the Lead Threshold sufficiently high, you end up right back at Go.

The western Go audience has been missing a unique feel and identity. Most other countries have their own words for things, including the game itself, even if they borrow words from Japanese. Stones seeks to build at least some form of western identity and unique feel while learning. For those of us that love Japanese culture and learned the game through it, learning terms in Japanese is a benefit or at worst neutral. For true outsiders that may not share those interests, it is a foreign language lesson on top of everything else. It feels foreign, it feels like fully borrowing or entering another culture. This is just as easily a big negative for a huge number of people. Stones has the improvement of internet searchability that ‘baduk’ grants to the game while carving out its own identity. It is also much less of a mouthful as ‘surrounding game’ or other more literal interpretations.

Yes. But none of the understanding is required to play and accurately decide the outcome. They don’t have to understand that Prisoner Return makes accounting for prisoner differences and Compensation possible without necessitating passing to end the game, it just happens if used They don’t have to understand that Staking accounts for Group Tax, it simply does. They don’t have to understand life and death, it is an emergent property that becomes fully realized through play.
Understanding becomes completely unnecessary, but fostered through experience as it should be. The game becomes purely mechanical and unambiguous. A program made of a few lines of code could simply select randomly from legal moves and produce a poorly played, but sound game beginning to end. For Go, this requires additional guidance on when to pass and how to count. Otherwise, two consecutive passes just have to happen by chance, at any random stage of the game, as Pass is always a legal move.