The Conquest of Go

Easily one of the best local Go clients. Useful for players of all skill levels, but especially useful to beginners since the game allows you to play 5x5 and 7x7 variants as well if you're struggling to wrap your head around even 9x9.. You can play vs. a variety of CPU opponents, or against ppl on OGS (free Go server, like Lichess) from within the game, while also working on the YUUGE COLLECTION of exercises collected by the community! I think, at this moment, it would be prudent to put the client aside, and instead explain why you should learn to play Go, and make it a part of your life! ______________________________________________ Go has been humbling people for a very long time. Born in China thousands of years ago, it's almost certainly the oldest board game still played in something close to its original form. Legend credits an emperor with inventing it to teach his wayward son patience and discipline, and if you've ever sat across a board from a quiet stranger who dismantles your entire strategy without breaking a sweat, that origin story will ring true. From China the game drifted across centuries and borders, taking root in Korea and Japan, where it evolved into something beyond a mere pastime—a way of seeing, a quiet art, a mirror for the mind. The fact that humans have been staring at this same simple grid, placing these same black and white stones for millennia, tells you everything you need to know. In ancient China, Go was not only a game you played when you were bored. It was one among the Four Arts of the Chinese scholar—the siyi—alongside playing the guqin (a silk-stringed zither), calligraphy, and painting. To be considered a true literati, you had to know your way around a Go board. These were the "Four Accomplishments"; they were the pillars of a refined soul, the measure of an educated and elegant mind. So when you sit down to play, you are not merely pushing stones around. You are stepping into a tradition that, for centuries, was considered as essential to a cultivated life as writing a poem or painting a mist-shrouded mountain. The rules are as elegant as they get. Two players, a grid, stones that never move. You place a stone, your opponent places a stone, and if you surround something completely, you capture it. That is essentially the entire rulebook. A child can learn in fifteen minutes, and countless children do. But from this tiny seed grows a universe so vast that even the finest players on the planet, after a lifetime of obsessive study, will tell you with a straight face that they are only just beginning to understand the game. The branching complexity makes chess look like a tidy little hedge maze, and yet the board itself remains an empty void, waiting for you to fill it with meaning. What makes Go genuinely worth your time, what sets it apart from almost every other strategy game on the shelf, is that it is not a fight. Chess is a duel to the death. Go is something else entirely. It is a conversation, a negotiation, a shared act of creation. The goal is not to annihilate your opponent but to end up with just a little more territory than they have. You can win a game of Go by half a point. You learn quickly that greed does not work. Try to grab everything, and your stones will suffocate. Play too timidly, and you will wake up to find your opponent has politely colonized three corners while you were busy building a fortress nobody asked for. The board becomes a mirror, and it teaches you, with quiet and implacable patience, about balance—about letting some things go to gain something more important, about lifting your eyes from the local brawl to see the whole, breathing landscape. And it is beautiful! Players speak of "good shape" and "flow" and "light" moves. A well-played sequence has an aesthetic quality, a visual poetry that makes perfect sense when you remember Go was once placed alongside painting and calligraphy as an art form. Two people, ostensibly trying to beat each other, are also making something together, a pattern that is at once a battle and a work of art. The benefits run deeper still. Science is beginning to catch up with what players have felt for centuries: Go is a profound workout for the brain, sharpening spatial reasoning, working memory, and executive function. Some studies even suggest it helps build resilience against cognitive decline. But the real prize might be emotional. Go teaches you to lose. There are no dice to curse, no bad luck to blame. A defeat is yours, clean and unadorned, and that makes every loss a genuine, if slightly uncomfortable, lesson. The board also reads your mood with unsettling accuracy. Approach it frustrated, and you will overreach and perish. Approach it with a clear, calm mind, and you might just make something beautiful. There is perhaps no better training for life than that. If any of this has stirred your curiosity, there are 4 steps worth taking immediately. First, watch this review of Go over at Shut Up & Sit Down (https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/videos/chess-month-go-review/), 2nd, watch the AlphaGo documentary on YouTube (https://youtu.be/WXuK6gekU1Y?si=cbLuSPCMLKwmF2B9), 3rd watch Hikaru No Go.. Finally, when the urge to play against other humans inevitably strikes, point your browser to the Online Go Server (available in-game as well as via browser and on Android - Sente Online Go). It is free, and it is filled with a lovely, global community of players at every skill level who will gently, relentlessly, and with great courtesy show you just how much you have left to learn. Go is a game you can play in ten-minute bursts on a phone or across six slow, thoughtful hours over a real wooden board with a pot of tea. It will meet you wherever you are. And if you let it, it will quietly teach you more than you ever expected.

建议玩家很重要的一点：AI对手一定要选KataGO-人类。唯一有人味，下棋有乐趣的AI，和Hybridcasual这些AI下全是一股机油味，难度不拉满就故意掉点恶心人，体验还不如AI时代前的银星围棋和zen

From the description it looked like this might be a good way to learn to play Go. It is not; its lessons are only useful to those who don't need them.

Good Game,

这个游戏才是围棋游戏最该有的形态，各种功能太方便了，谁玩谁知道。五星好评。

Excellent!

This is a great game if you are at any point in you're GO career. only complaint is that is that the tips disappear too fast. give the prompt to "continue" so that players have some time to digest the tips. great game otherwise.

UI could be way more polished and customizable, and feature complexity is quite overwhelming (especially when playing casually) but overall solid

[list] [*]画风很喜欢，相邻的棋子会自动连在一起方便玩家观察，快被吃了也会有棋子受伤的图案提示 [*]平时可以和不同难度的AI练习，对局时可以用资源换取AI提示，组队赛、引导对局也很适合让人边下边向AI学习 [*]另外创意工坊也有很多死活题可以做 [/list] [list] [b]一些建议：[/b] [*]复盘时希望AI能说明原因，仅说出答案的话有点一头雾水，我有时候会不清楚为什么“下这里”就不行，而“下那里”胜率更高 [*][b][u]希望能多一些背景音乐！！跪求那种高山流水的古风bgm！！[/u][/b] [/list]

Go is a great game for anyone that likes strategic board games like chess. The Conquest of Go is a solid implementation of it with a guide, surprisingly fun campaign and easy post-game analysis. The art style is fun and unique and helps beginners understand stone connections, though I assume it will take some time to get used to not having them when you play somewhere else.