Go for non-Go People - my method of teaching for mass adoption

Go Resources
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Hey all,

I’ve been working on a project based on a crowd favorite: teaching beginners and getting more people to play Go I’d like to share with you. This is a work in progress and especially the outer section is subject to change to suit any number of needs.

The Diagnosis
I see a lot of beginners, or would be casual players, simply never get to the point of passing and counting confidently by any rules, to really feel like they can play the game without a stronger player around or - more importantly - teach and create more beginners themselves. The structure is very sensei-led. For those that are all in, or just studious or “dive in” to hobbies, this is all fine and well. And I think there are a billion worthwhile methods and projects for those like us. But concepts like territory, even “controlling the board,” and amorphous, and especially hard for one beginner to describe to another. This means nobody can just find the game, in the wild, and play it and think they’ve reached an accurate conclusion. I always contrast this to chess - very bad players still play casually, and even teach others! They may be very bad at actualizing checkmate, but they get the goal, they see progress towards or away from it, they can answer any misunderstandings by simply rereading the rulebook, even for tricky things like stalemate, en passant, and castling and with the latter two, they can still functionally play the game without them. This is meant to supplement existing projects and methods, and target a different group of people, not to compete with or displace them.

My Proposed Solution
Some of the popular methods to get around this have been to teach Capture Go or, in some cases, to teach Population Go (i.e. “who can place the most stones on the board”). AGA pass stones can also be seen as an effort to mitigate this, allowing anything to be played out without penalty, and taking away some of the uncertainty of passing. This method builds on these themes. It is an extension of Capture Go, a shortening of Population Go, and a conversion of end-of-game conventions into physical actions, which require no guessing, no agreement, no understanding of concept, but still generate an almost identical result. This means that players don’t have to understand anything to play a game to completion, and for the winner of the game under these rules to certainly be the player who played a better game under any other ruleset. All of this in a simple trifold that can be included in any set, or fashined into a “rules and board” variation, much like those from Go and Math Academy and others.

The inner trifold, with the “meat”

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The outer dressing, which may be changed any number of ways

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Common Questions, Critiques
Feel free to extrapolate on these, just setting a baseline for recurring conversations
This seems more confusing, not less confusing
In a sense, it is, but it is mostly of looking at the game from a standpoint where you already understand so many of the “why” questions, especially how and why the game ends and how to accurately assess that state. It is also complete - this is all you need to know to 100% play and everything else is discoverable and even encouraged to be discovered by experience. When we write “simpler” rules, we leave a lot out. Any mention of territory is opening a complicated door to life and death, eyes, false eyes, seki, bent 4, and many other concepts, all of which have to be understood to accurately assess the end of a game, which is all left out and cannot be directly discovered by play because two beginners might not understand the implications and repeatedly agree to a wrong result. For people that want to learn, do teaching games, etc, that’s not an issue. But for people who are going to get maybe one quick session, and then be left to their own device or encounter Go in the wild? This is just unworkable. Many of you may share the experience of trying to explain exactly what the goal is and how to do it. And this has been an achille’s heel for mass go adoption for a long time.
Why not just do Population Go?
You certainly can! But it is still hard to imagine how to have a bigger population. At the end of the day, it can only be done by capturing. It’s about capture, baby! Always has been! Territory itself only exists to the extent that you can capture and not be captured anything that challenges it.
This method makes some tradeoffs for clarity of goal and playability that reaches a balance between being “real” Go and being palatable. Counting in Population Go is a bit combersome, especially when you get to 13x13. You still have passing. It’s a little more concrete on when that happens, but it still allows for funny end results with premature passes. This also (controversially) allows a sort of “mercy” rule for when players are still learning and maybe being outpaced. I view this as a positive. If you are leading by the designated number of captures, you are 99% likely winning, and your time is probably better spent playing another game than having all the rest of your stones wiped.
Aren’t there times you can win despite being down many captures?
Yes, and most of these examples are far outside the scope of this project. You are probably ready to play by other rulesets if you can do complicated exchanges. There are occasinoal edgecases of, say, needing to kill the internal liberties of a bulky 5 costing you stones you cannot afford. I’d love to do some kind of test to see what this is, but I can’t imagine it’s more than 1 in 1000 games of strong players that this is the case, and far less for the level it is designed for. All rulesets have slight deviations. This is no different, it just has to be worth it, and it is to me. In fact, it can be a learning step to realize “if we kept going, I would win, though,” and increase the max captures. When you increase the max to half the board + 1, you have eliminated all edge cases and are 100% playing Go.
Why are Rules 6 and 7 so weird
Mostly to avoid jargon and to make things like group tax/group difference and komi purely deterministic actions that physically do the counting for the player. It is passing by another name, but in such a way it can only be done when necessary. It allows players to feel the capture race of the whole board, and of any komi and how it represents the extra moves you’re going to need to be able to make before it runs out.

It’s a big ask, but I’d love to have this programmed as a mode on OGS some day, especially to test how often the winner of this game is the winner/strong leader of Go from that same point, but that might be an undertaking. The nice thing is you won’t have to program any counting into it, but doing rules 6 and 7 visually, or some other satisfactory way, might be a task.

Feel free to give me any questions and comments! Try teaching non-go players with this some time, especially in big groups where you’re not going to be able to give lots of hands on time to each person and just want to get them playing amongst themselves quickly! Because that’s where the magic really is, giving people a way to interact with the game completely independently, and teach others, even from a place of low information. More people will play go seriously if more people just PLAY go!

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Sounds interesting; certainly unique

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Inventions:

It seems like you’ve introduced some new concepts(that I’ve never heard about before) like Group reward and Final race to simplify the rules. I’m sceptical about now helpful it really is. Also I question word choice in “A common example of how you might place up to 5 Handicap stones for a 9x9 game.”. There’s nothing common about playing a 5 stones handi on 9x9, moreover, I think handicap stone on 3rd line instead of 4th line is too overpowered.

  1. Too much information?

  • Handicap could be removed entirely.
    I think if both players are beginners then they don’t need a handicap because of how volatile the game between them would be. Even if one beginner player is stronger then other there’s a pretty high chance of him losing. On the other hand, if a complete beginner will play against an experienced player he would propose and explain a handicap to a beginner himself if he thinks that would be reasonable.

  • Winning condition could be simplified.
    I think that original atari go is sufficient enough, but also I see nothing wrong with your invention. It just could be simpler (no need to count prisoners and memorise unique number for every board size).

I taught go rules to beginners for a few days at an event. Surprisingly, the most effective strategy that we spontaneously came up with is when one person would teach basic capturing and atari go to a huge number of people on a big magnetic board in the hall. He would tell that there’re other additional rules, but he would not explain them. Instead he forwards people to the other teachers who would explain the game more in depth on individual boards.

The thing that it does is it filters interested and more passionate players from those who don’t want to think hard, so people don’t waste their time for a whole rules explanation and can try go after 20-30 secs of introduction.

I see that you yourself went for this two stage solution unconsciously/partially. If you would replace the 5-Winning with atari go then you’ll make introductory part shorter and easier, because you no longer need to include inherently confusing ko rule to start playing.
And in a second advanced part, because you know that people are confirmed committed players, you could just teach them complete Japanese, Chinese or AGA rules instead of wasting their time on a ruleset that they would play once and never use it again after.

I think overall text and diagrams look quite nice. I would suspect that average person would like more vibrant image more. As of now it looks almost b&w.

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Rule 4, Example 1, probably needs a clearer statement that white is playing into a captured position and that not removing a stone must itself be removed. That condition is inferred but not clearly stated.

The Rule 6 diagram shows Black 1 and 3 one position below their intended location, right?

The Rule 7 diagram has the same issue as well? Rule 7 seems a bit confusing, but I would like to try it to see how it works in practice.

This appears to have some similarity to the ruleset for Autistic Go presented by Myungsun Kim 9P, although I can’t say for sure without a better understanding myself.

The What’s Next and Go Is Simple! Go is Fun! sections could be polished slightly to sound more positive and avoid complicating the conversation by omitting direct references to specific rule sets or using complex vocabulary. “fully functional,” for example, can be omitted. It is overall a really good distillation of ideas, in my opinion!

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"He would tell that there’re other additional rules, but he would not explain them. Instead he forwards people to the other teachers who would explain the game more in depth on individual boards.

The thing that it does is it filters interested and more passionate players from those who don’t want to think hard, so people don’t waste their time for a whole rules explanation and can try go after 20-30 secs of introduction."

This is a very interesting idea! Exactly the kind of stagecraft that can help us avoid becoming pedantic to an audience that maybe hasn’t fully committed yet.

Part of the appeal of the simplified game is the ability to share the game quickly to create a play partner. Shifting to an official rule set immediately would make that impossible, imo.

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Group reward is actually what we all play with! “Group Tax” was introduced to bridge the change from population Go (likely the first version of ‘ancient go’ beyond capture go), and ‘group tax’ had to be introduced to account for the difference (you can place less stones on the board with more groups because you need to keep more eyes open). Then, we decided that doesn’t come up much and is a hassle, so we got rid of it… but really, it’s easier to just think of it as “we went from most stones on the board to most stones on the board +2 reward per extra group.” And it’s counterintuitive to explain a “tax” to an uninitiated, because the obvious question is “tax of what” and then you have to explain everything I just explained. You don’t have to explain ‘group reward.’ Reward for what? For the groups (point to groups). It’s actually a very, very small change that forms a nice bridge across the history of the rules of Go without actually having to state it, masquerading as an alien invention.

Yes, the handicap section is completely reworkable or removable and of lesser impact than the other things. It had initially had no diagram and just been the mention of “a player may start the game playing more stones.” This is valid and the old way of doing handicap anyway.

I do not think the winning condition can be simplified. You can cut out the “for one set of turns” bit, but it just cuts out some edge cases of big exchanges, snapbacks, etc and only costs a few words to do so. But if you just turn it into capture go again, you lose the bridge, and it’s as if you’re not teaching people 'real go.; I want to be clear: this is a fully functional form of the game. Besides the farthest out there exceptions, every strategy that is good for Go is good for Simple Go and vice versa. The winner of one is the winner/leader if you stopped and evaluated with a strong player/AI of the other. And if you expand the win condition number of stones higher, the overlap goes from 99%+ to 100%. They are fully identical at, say, ‘lead by 45’ on a 9x9. But that is even more clunky to play than Population Go. The very, very small difference is worth the digestible game it produces. This is a decision all evolutions in the rules have made, including just getting rid of group tax because, man, who care?

“The thing that it does is it filters interested and more passionate players from those who don’t want to think hard, so people don’t waste their time for a whole rules explanation and can try go after 20-30 secs of introduction.”

See, I strongly disagree with this notion and think it is actually a problem with the way we teach and view Go, what it is, and what it isn’t. I’ll again compare it to chess: Chess is often seen as studious, for “smart people,” academic, a thing requiring passion and hard thinking. But it is also just a fully casual game that very bad players will play. We scare off true casuals with this kind of thinking. They have no place. We give them no way to interface with the game. We “weed them out” or relegate them to Capture Go and are clear that it’s not the same and if they don’t reach a certain level of competence, they can’t move on. And, as a result, we totally lose those people. I think this is THE biggest issue Go faces and particularly setting the winning condition as it is is fundamental to fixing it.

Yes, it’s meant for black and white printing, part of it is red, I had planned on adding color at some point.

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Playing a full game is not mandatory. Some would play just atari go. If they’d want to know about aforementioned other/additional rules they’d reach out for help and I would teach them.

There’s no immediate need to fully teach scoring rules or techniques, because you have a teacher who would monitor the game as you play in case if confusion occurs as well as help to count the game in the end.

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I read the filtering function slightly differently. The teacher can simply say, “That’s a great question! Let’s come back to it next time/later, and play a few games first.” Keeping students on subject and on task is important, but you also want to encourage the curious, even when you can’t follow them down a rabbit hole.

“How old is this game?”

“It’s the oldest game. Anyway, let’s sit down at the boards.”

OR

“Well, according to legend, this king had a lazy son. However, many believe this origin story to be apocryphal, and archeologists suggest at least 2000 years earlier. This depends on how you define the current game, of course.”

I much prefer the former, don’t you?

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Rule 4. I kind of like that it is implied myself, but I’ll think about it.

yeah, there are a couple assets that just seem to have a mind of their own and wander around when things get adjusted like those Rule 6 and 7 stones. I’ve fixed it, hopefully for the last time.

I’m unfamiliar with Autistic Go, so give me anymore you have.

Oh yes, lots of polishing to be done everywhere. I particularly rushed through the back section with the plans to refine it later.

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Mr. Kim mentioned this in the teaching seminar at the US Go Congress last week, but did not have time to go into detail. There is this video from Korean television, but the auto-generated subtitles were a bit impossible to sort out. still worth a quick look!

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Technically, this is included within the win condition, as you can just make the lead 1 capture, I could even add a line that says “do that first, then work up to this.”

The point is we don’t need to choose, though. You can have it all right here, no teacher necessary for that early phase. The counting works itself out until it becomes self evident if players get to that point. And then, of course, a teacher can accelerate things if that’s what they want. But if they don’t, boom, they just have a fully functional game that is both capture Go if they play to 1 capture, almost identical Go if they play to, say, 10 on a 9x9, and fully identical Go if they extend it further.

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Straight to play is the way.

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I think you just missed the idea here. I suggested the two stage approach which makes it possible both simplify the game and not miss anything either. If you would try to achieve both at once you’ll inevitably end up halfassing, sorry if a bit harsh.

I don’t know if you had taught before, but there’re people who just stuck on rules explanation part and say “oh, I think it’s too hard for me” and they would leave. Go is not easy. Not being easy is enough for some to pass on this game and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Edit:
The goal is not to separate people into categories, but to allow them to try out go as fast as possible, by lowering entrance barrier, to reach out to as many people as possible.
I can’r think of a great example right now, but it’s like making a game for a game jam: if you don’t make it playable directly from the browser and force people to download it first to play, then less people will play and rate your game. 30 seconds ruleset allows to lower the entry minimum. 4 liberties, players play stones alternately, 1st capture wins.

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Yes, I have been teaching for, geez, coming on 20 years. Ever since I learned. This is based off the consistent failure points I’ve observed over that time and observed in others.

I don’t think there’s any half ass. They’re just the same game. Actually, I feel the other way is half assed and we have to keep going back over and over to patch up things we skip for brevity.

“I don’t know if you had taught before, but there’re people who just stuck on rules explanation part and say “oh, I think it’s too hard for me” and they would leave. Go is not easy. Not being easy is enough for some to pass on this game and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

The goal is to fix that as much as possible. People get stuck on ending the game, passing, etc the most and when you feel like you can’t end a game, you feel like you can’t play it, and if you don’t get it, you quit. This removes all of that, even if they’re never good, they never have to quit because they just don’t get it, they can at least quit because they just don’t like it.

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I much prefer this one. Humans love Story, and a short and sweet anecdote is a wonderful fit for a setting where you want to largely skip the question. The other one feels more dismissive, and is hardly shorter anyway

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Let’s consider the audience for a moment:

A young couple at an Asian Festival, a 5th-grade elementary student who got out of class to learn a game, or someone who saw Alphago on Netflix and showed up to a Go club meeting at a local cafe.

These are not Go players, not yet, anyway.

We could discuss all manner of fascinating ideas about the history and origins of our game. For example, consider that Go, Morris, Tic-Tac-Toe, Mancala, and Draughts/Checkers are all games that can be played with nothing more than contrasting river rocks and a board drawn in sand or dirt. These games could easily be much, much older than we have ever imagined. Older than agriculture, older than the stone age, perhaps a hundred thousand years old. But, we will never have a way to prove it because the best archeological evidence you could hope to find would be two piles of stones on the beach or next to a stream.

And while you and I ponder this and debate the issue,

The couple nodded politely and moved on, following the smell of rice cakes. The elementary school student began fighting with his classmate. The Alphago watcher is still smiling, but their smile has become a mask, and whether they know it or not, a decision has been made to seek fun elsewhere.

I want those people to get on a board and have fun playing a game as quickly as humanly possible. The wonderful things the players love about the game have to come later.

And some catnip for you:

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I think you’re projecting a bit. Some people don’t care about the story and background surrounding a game; others may be fascinated by it and it may even become their engine to learn more about the game.

I’m not advocating for dropping the full lore on any beginner that crosses the door of a Go club, but if I asked questions about the history of the game I wouldn’t like to be told “yeah it’s old, now enough talk, play”. :slight_smile:

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Your best candidate to become a player is probably the one who wants to debate the rules of the game or explore the lore, I will give you that! :100:

But as a teacher, experience has taught me how important it is to stay focused to get to the destination. I can actually hear myself saying the words you put in my mouth. :joy:

Go is a game in the end, isn’t it?

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It’s a game, but I do think “tradition/history” is a valid criterion (among others) when evaluating whether a game could be worth investigating

To be clear: there’s many modern abstract games out there, and probably a few that could theoretically rival Go or Chess in terms of depth. Yet I’m not playing them, and if you had showed me an unknown game called “Super Surround” in a cardboard box with the same rules as Go, it certainly wouldn’t have grabbed me the same way…

All this being said, I understand of course the danger for a teacher to get too excited by this lore stuff and spend way more time on it than the student’s question warranted.

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I like the direction of this discussion!

I’ll say, generally, I agree with @Plum_Talk . The weight on things we care about as insiders is too heavy at first. To whom is projecting, I’ll just say this, despite most of my life sharing these facts, as is tradition, I have never once been asked “oh, how old is this game” by an interested passerby, and if you dig deep, you know that’s true for your experience, too. The closest has been “where does it come from,” of which the answer is often shoehorned into when and where (though they still didn’t ask).

We need people playing first. Then work in that stuff organically. The ones who are drawn in to it from a history, math, whatever perspective… they already know the basic factoids. That’s why they were drawn to it. Leading with math or history to the broader public just makes it seem like it can never be anything but a niche interest for the fixated, so there needs to be another approach in addition to the norm. I know plenty of people who play chess who don’t know who Bobby Fisher is besides “one of the GOATs,” don’t know when or where chess comes from besides “Russia, probably.” It can be that way. Unless you just don’t think Go is actually fun.

One thing that I really enjoy about this approach is it covertly does teach the history of the Rules of Go, just without saying so much. It takes you from Ancient Rules, to the Group Tax Area, to modern Area and the rest and it’s very easy to explain each step. It also begs of people to ask “why is it this way” and when you show how they’re roughly equivalent, and just counting the same things different ways (mostly to make it quicker for more skilled players), you get to tell a whole history naturally, through play, as discovery warrants it and never before. It doesn’t forget history, it bakes it in instead of making it a top 10 list of factoids and short lectures. Lectures that, by the way, might later be enjoyed… AFTER the player has decided “okay, this is fun and interesting.” The self-discovery is what makes people ask “how deep does this go” and that’s why you go “deeper than you’ll even know, in every direction.” And then follow the direction that interests them until it bleeds into all the others.