History & Origins
Go is almost certainly the oldest strategy board game still played in its original form today. Chinese legend attributes its invention to the Emperor Yao around 2300 BC, who supposedly created it to teach his son discipline and concentration. While the mythological origin is charming, archaeological evidence suggests the game developed gradually during the Zhou Dynasty, with the earliest definitive written references appearing around 548 BC.
Known in Chinese as Weiqi (围棋, meaning "encirclement game"), it spread to Korea — where it became Baduk — around the 5th or 6th century AD, and to Japan — where it became Igo — around the same period. In Japan especially, Go flourished under aristocratic patronage and eventually became a professional pursuit, with the Tokugawa shogunate establishing four official Go houses and a ranking system in the 17th century that survives in modified form to this day.
For most of its history, Go was considered Asia's supreme intellectual challenge. It was one of the four arts that a cultured Chinese gentleman was expected to master, alongside calligraphy, painting, and playing the guqin.
Cultural Significance
In East Asian culture, Go has carried philosophical weight far beyond its status as a game. The concept of fuseki (opening strategy) has been used as a metaphor for military planning, business strategy, and political thinking for centuries. Sun Tzu's The Art of War and Go strategy share many overlapping ideas about indirect action, the importance of position, and thinking several moves ahead.
In Japan, Go became so culturally significant that the government officially sponsored the game's top players for nearly 300 years. The title of Meijin (master) was the most prestigious honour in the game, and matches for the title were national events. The novelist Yasunari Kawabata, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, wrote a famous account of a Meijin title match as one of his most celebrated works.
Go has also played a surprising role in the history of artificial intelligence. For decades, computer scientists used chess as a benchmark for machine intelligence — and cracked it in 1997 when Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov. Go was considered a far more distant challenge due to its complexity. When Google's AlphaGo defeated world champion Lee Sedol in 2016, it was considered one of the landmark moments in the history of AI — a genuine shock to the professional Go world.
The Beauty of Simplicity
Go's rules can be taught in minutes: two players alternate placing black and white stones on the intersections of a 19×19 grid, trying to surround territory and capture the opponent's stones by surrounding them. There are essentially only two rules. Yet from these two rules emerges a game of staggering complexity — there are more possible Go positions than atoms in the observable universe.
This gap between simple rules and profound depth is what has made Go so enduring. Unlike chess, where pieces have specific powers and the game has a defined end state, Go is territorial and flowing — the board shifts gradually, areas of influence expand and contract, and a game can turn on a single unexpected move. Players speak of Go as something closer to a conversation than a battle.
Why It Endures
Go remains one of the most actively played strategy games in the world, with an estimated 40–60 million players globally. Professional circuits exist in China, Japan, and South Korea, where top players are celebrities. Online Go communities are vast and welcoming to beginners, and the ranking system — from 30 kyu (beginner) to 9 dan (grandmaster) — gives players a clear path of lifelong improvement. It is genuinely one of those rare games where you can spend a lifetime learning and still find new depths.