The Deceptively Deep Game Hiding on Your Go Board

What if you only have 10 minutes to play a game? This would be a good opportunity to play Gomoku (also known as Five-in-a-Row).

Why Should a Go Player Care About Gomoku

Gomoku is a game of pure attack and defense, making it a great way to sharpen your board reading skills with other aspects such as territory and influence stripped away leaving only threats.

How to play Gomoku

The rules for Gomoku are quite simple. While there are additional rules that can be applied such as “Swap2” to combat the first player advantage the basic rules are as follows:

  1. One player plays as black stone and the other white stones
  2. Black moves first playing their first stone anywhere on the board.
  3. Players alternate turns placing their stones on empty intersections

The first player to form an unbroken line of exactly five stones wins the game. There is no capturing, no territory, and no points. All it takes is a five-in-a-row to win!

Where to play Gomoku Online

There are online Gomoku sites that allow you to play for free against other players online such as GomokuFive.

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As go player I met far too many people mixing go and gomoku (even a toy seller in China!) that I guess I would never be so interested in gomoku.
Note that it was a very popular activity between children using a pen and a paper (for example when the teacher is boring)

Anyway a little search on this forum will help you find gomoku partners

Among the results from the query we may mention this thread too

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