(Sorry if this has been asked before, didn’t manage to find it.)
What happens when you run out of stones mid-game (lots of killing 
)?
Can you agree to take some prisoners back equally to keep playing?
Does the game just go to counting?
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Play online - we never run out 
But yes, as far as I know, it is common to exchange equal ammounts of prisoners if you do not have enough stones. It does not change the score.
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I do 
, I’m trying to bring in new sheep to slaughter. 
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Play with an area scoring ruleset so that keeping track of captures doesn’t matter for scoring the game!
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We scored with kifu snap, you overestimate my abilities.
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Must have been a lot of killing to run out of stones. Or did you throw stones at each other out of furstration?
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I can imagine it happening with a multi-ko of some kind
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As I recall, Honinbo Jowa still holds the record for the most dead & captured stones in any professional game (around 180, I think). Michael Macfadyen published a review of that game in the BGJ in the 1980s.
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Doesn’t even have to be one multi-ko (multi step/stage) but just a game with multiple separate kos and/or sizeable captures/trades.
It’s happened to me in tournaments before that we run out of stones and just swap like 10 prisoners each. That’s using japanese rules of course.
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I think an even simpler explanation is that some basic sets don’t even have close to 180 stones of each color.
The game is meant to have an infinite supply of stones. Prisoner exchange is one solution. Even still, it is possible for one player to have more than 180 stones on the board, so what remains is to use other tokens or borrow stones from another set.
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We may have graced the pavement below with a couple of stones since I bought the set…
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At some point simply agree to score using Chinese (stone-counting) scoring. “Some point” being when it becomes faster to fill the board than to rearrange stones in tidy territories…
And if you end up with a half-point result that depends on the ruleset, call it a draw.
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I’ll call OGS helpline probably 
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Many years ago some new faces showed up at our city go tournament. When the first round ended, a funny thing happened: the newbies didn’t know how to count the score. They had learned go online.
So Mark, online go is cool, but there is also something to say in favour of real life go 
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My wife and I always did a prisoner exchange when we ran out of stones.
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