How about marbles on a clay go board, in which the intersections are holes (so that marbles don’t roll away, while playing).
361 intersections is a lot, but this is not so time consuming as @Lys 's project.
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I hope that they do not refuse to play on shell and slate as well.
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from my experience of what is called sometimes Chinese draught in western countries (I don’t know why btw? it’s absolutely not popular here) the marbles are stable… as long as you don’t pick them, it’s easy then to disturb the position.
Well besides that sure it could be a cheap solution (are marble cheaper as glass stones? I dunno)
for the board instead of clay I would just use a wood one and make the recipients lightly with the head of a drill.
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I live in Brazil so all my messages came straight from the google translator haha. So, any go equipment is infinitely more expensive here than there, because everything is imported and the real (R $) is super devalued. Even if I wear out all my soul and my time, it is still cheaper than buying go stones
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and you have good cheap wood there I guess? Nice to hear a player from Brazil anyway!
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wooden handles are the most common here, so I’m going to try to find the lightest cable I can find and the darkest cable. The problem is to find some guy with a saw willing to cut more than 361 strips hahaha
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I will wait for a picture! Good luck!
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thank you, i will need
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I rediscovered this on L19.
I found an interesting quote today in the book Games and Mathematics by David Wells (2012):
“When I learned to play in the 1960s good stones and boards were hard to come by in the West so we used a kind of sugared almond, painting half of them black. The shape was close to Japanese standard stones which are made of shell or slate, but the weight, colour and feel were not right, but that mattered not at all because we used them as Go stones so they were Go stones.”
It was suggested in the thread that they were Jordan almonds.
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More here
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Hi, new here.
In these days I’m trying to make my own stones with self-hardening clay. This is my current procedure, I am pretty satisfied by the shape and regularity of the stones, I still have to paint them. Material cost for 361 stones should be around 75 eur, in terms of time, I am currently estimating around 36 hours of work, unless I get faster at modeling the stones 
. To speed up the process and get an even better result, I’m thinking of building a mini lathe using a small dc motor with small gearmotor. I’ll let you know!
- Cut off the neck of a plastic water bottle (where the cap screws on). The internal diameter is approximately 22mm
- Cut a strip of 220g/m cardboard (or use a sheet of paper) about 2cm wide and 20cm long and wrap it inside the cap. This will reduce the internal diameter to approximately 19mm. Determine how many wraps to make based on the internal diameter. For stones of 22mm diameter, a 19mm dimeter should be fine, as the stone will get larger later.
- Take out the rolled strip of paper, without unrolling it, and use tape to secure both the inside and outside sides. This way the cylinder will not fall apart.
- Take a small amount of self-hardening clay and crush it between two wooden boards, appropriately spaced from each other (using coins for example, or paper sheets) to reach the desired thickness (e.g. 8mm)
- Cut a cylinder of clay using the paper cylinder
- Start working on the cylinder by lightly pinching the edges. In this way the diameter of the stone will increase, and the biconvex shape will be created. Be careful to create mainly a straight edge, and periodically check the roundness by comparing it with the cylinder.At this stage the dough is still very soft and the shapes will not be very smooth.
- After about 1 hour, take the stone back in your hand and smooth the sharpest edges
- When everything has dried, paint the stone with a slightly thick acrylic paint. Alternatively you can mix a little vinyl glue into the paint
- When the paint has dried, use a vitrifier (e.g. Vernidas) to make the stone smooth and resistant
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They look great although for my personal taste i prefer stones to be more thick. Btw, can you give us the total cost for reference?
Thicker stones should be even easier to craft. Still work in progress, but roughly:
- 20 EUR for 2kg self-hardening clay
- 15 EUR for black and white acrilyc paint. There is some room for optimization here as I only found 2 140ml bottles for 7.5 EUR each
- 15 EUR for vitrifier.
- 5 EUR for 2 paint brushes
- 5 EUR for wood (optional, can use other items for separator and clay flattening: I used two rulers)
Total 60 EUR
Still Todo:
- 15 EUR for dc motor for the mini-lathe
- 2.5 EUR for clay modeling stick
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Go stones were stones at start.
But if you say you want DIY some go stones, I think clay stones and PP(PE) stones may be easy to make.
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You can cut a simple mold out of a ping pong ball, that makes the flattening of the edge faster and cleaner.
Thanks. I tried creating a silicone mold, but since the clay is too soft, it’s not easy to remove the clay from the mold. Besides, a ping pong ball is a sphere, and afaik the biconvex 22mm wide / 8-10mm thick stones doesn’t have the same shape.
As I wrote before you get honorable result by putting a ball of clay centered in your palm and splashing it with the other hand. Just a bit of practice which cost nothing besides patience.
For a nice bonus you get a marbling from the small lines of your hand
Yes I agree. From a functional point of view, everything is fine. I am just trying to explore how far one can get by using simple tools.
Btw, I tried to craft some thicker stones, which I agree are more pleasing. This one is 10mm thick
I confirm it’s easier to craft, it takes around 2 minutes to craft one; adding roughly 1 min for paint and vitrification, total time for 361 stones is around 18 hours. However, in terms of material costs, it would probably take 6kg instead of 2kg of self-hardening clay so roughly 60 EUR for clay.
I think I will try 8mm stones.
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I used natural clay (free where i was). Didn’t cook them so they stayed a bit breakable. Didn’t mind.