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Let me describe the game they are playing in the picture, a type of Fang-qi. It’s a family of game variants not one specific game, a game about trying to form certain shapes. The simplest one being a “square”, 2x2 solid 4 stones in a square form (hence the name).
It has even simpler rules where there is no “liberty” to “objectively” determine which stones are dead, but they are subjectively selected by opponents. The goal of the game is to form certain shapes. And the board size doesn’t matter (don’t even need to be an odd number of the same number, it can be 5x5, 5x6, 5x7, 6x6, 7x8, etc. depending on the regions, or as long as both sides agree). The following is the general rules of the most basic kind, and existed in some forms or another across all of them.
Each side has half the amount of pieces to the grid numbers (if it is an odd number, the first one to play gets one extra), and then each player takes turns to put a stone on the grid. During this first phase, players can place their pieces wherever they like (even just randomly), but normally it would be ill-advised to try to form the shape at this phase (the reason will be explained later).
The second phase starts by picking a certain amount of pieces of your opponents with equal amount and remove them from the board (if it is an odd number of grids, the one that has one less piece can remove one extra to balance the pieces left, the amount is also varied from different variations and place to place). And the strategy of this phase is obviously to break apart the opponent’s shape, and this is why you’d try “not” to form shapes at the initial placing phase, so your opponent will have no priority to break them apart at this stage, a cat and mouse game.
And the final stage is played where each side moves pieces still on the board, to form the shape. The rule of how a piece can move and how far, from jump across pieces, move in a line, move diagonal, all kinds existed in different local variants. Every time a shape is formed, one of the opponent’s pieces of choice is picked and “captured” to be removed. The pieces that haven’t formed a shape need to be picked first before shape formed pieces, otherwise, the game will go on like a random move without strategies. The game ended when one side can no longer formed a shape. Usually there is no need to count captives, since the last one to form a shape will usually have the advantage to kill off all the opponent’s remaining loose pieces that haven’t formed a shape.
As described above, these rules seem pretty raw and flexible. And they are so widespread and diverse in many different places, it is highly likely they are very old, and morphed to different local variants over a long time with their highly adapted rules, low requirement, and lots of flavors to be added and evolved.
However, my interest lies in that there is an extra method in some of the varieties, and is related to the topic we are discussing here - “marked pieces”, especially marked captives. This extra step method is applied during the initial phase, or more precisely it is a merger of the first phase and second phase, by marking some spot on the board to be “dead space” where neither side can place a piece there (even an entire line can be marked as forbidding). The purpose of this method is very simple - speed up the placement and removal phase, and go directly into the fun moving and capturing phase (instead of placing till the board is full, and then removing. Doing two things at once).
It is easy to see where I drew my inspiration for my hypothetical Go precursor. It is essentially a very special variant of this type of shape rearranging game that omits the last moving and capturing phase. Think about it, on a very small board, if some of the early variants in the ancient time applied the speed-up marking captive method and repeatedly played by many players, and then as players got stronger and better, they would soon realize that there are only so many different board positions after the removal worth playing, and most don’t even need to play out the moving and capturing phase to be able to tell the final outcomes. Hence, the logical next step, is to increase the board size to have more variations and positions, and maybe keep adding more and more different shapes, until someone thinks of a way to “objectively” picked those “marked spot”, in order for the game to be on-par in positions and competitive even for the strongest players to have fun.
Finally, at some point, it ended up evolving into a game where it is more and more about the beginning strategy phase to gain an advantage than the later part of moving and captures, since the latter part will be long decided in the initial phase, no matter how hard the side with “losing positions” tried to capture stones later on.
I would even postulate that ko fight is essentially another modification of the second phase and the speed-up captive marking process, defined as moving pieces to previously held captives’ spots in limited fashion, most likely some of a mixed of the placement phase and moving and captures phase. It would be like trying to merge all phases in to one, with minimum number of steps as possible. The initial rational would be as long as they have potential to form more shapes, some “loose pieces” could be “sacrificed” inside enemy strong positions to have a better chance in advantage positions elsewhere. It would be the same reasoning as modern ko, just under different rule sets with different definitions of “solid/alive shapes”.