Grid’s quiet. Black and white are waiting. Drop a stone — if it runs out of air, it leaves.
Black to play.
Go is the board game of black and white stones played on the intersections of a grid. In Chinese it is usually called Weiqi; in Korean, Baduk. The name changes, but the game does not. You place stones, surround useful space, and capture by taking away liberties. Most importantly, the board above is already live. You do not have to click through a ceremonial Play gate or register just to see whether the game makes sense in your hands.
Because most people who land here are not looking for a homepage speech. They want to know whether this is a real Go board, whether it responds, and whether they can place a stone without being dragged through a funnel first. So the board shows up before the explanations. If you want to read, the text is here. If you want to test the game first and come back later, that is usually the better order anyway.
Usually it is people who searched something plain like “play Go online” and actually meant a board, not a list of apps and account forms. Sometimes it is someone who typed Weiqi or Baduk and wants to confirm that they are still looking at the same game. Sometimes it is a student with ten quiet minutes, or a chess player who wants to understand territory instead of checkmate, or somebody who bounced off a portal page full of unrelated games and just wanted one desk and one board.
The default board is 9×9, which is small enough that the first real fight starts early and large enough that the game still feels like Go. You can widen to 13×13 or 19×19 when you want more room, but changing the size starts a fresh game. Black moves first. Stones go on intersections, not inside squares. The empty adjacent points around a stone are its liberties, and when the last liberty disappears, that stone or group comes off the board.
Liberties are the first idea that makes the whole game stop feeling mysterious. A group stays alive as long as it still touches at least one empty adjacent intersection. Take the last liberty and the group comes off, which is capture. Ko is the rule that stops the shortest endless recapture loop: if a move would recreate the same shape immediately, you have to play elsewhere first. If that paragraph almost made sense but not quite, `How to play` is the gentler version and `Go rules` is the stricter one.
Click an empty intersection and black plays there. White is handled by the AI built into the page, so what you notice is a short thinking pause, not a lobby spinner pretending to be drama. Hint can suggest a point, Undo walks a move back, and Pass means exactly what it should mean: skip the turn. When both sides pass in a row, the game ends, and on this board captures decide who led. Sound stays quiet until you ask for it.
The home board is meant to get you into a game quickly, not to make a ceremony out of choosing a level. Easy is forgiving, Medium starts asking for cleaner habits, and Hard is where lazy liberties begin to get punished. None of these settings are pretending to be a professional 19×19 sparring partner. If you want a page that puts the AI choice front and center, `vs computer` does that more explicitly.
Go, Weiqi (围棋), Baduk, and Igo are different language names for the same game family. The point of keeping those pages separate is not to pretend they are different products; it is to let people enter through the name they already know and still arrive at the same board without having to decode vocabulary first.
It is not western chess, not Xiangqi, not a stranger-matching lobby, and not an installer page wearing a board-game costume. It is also not one of those portals that lines up fifty unrelated titles in the hallway and hopes you misclick into something louder. It is just a Go board with a few supporting pages around it.
If you came through pinyin, `What is Weiqi` is the quickest naming bridge. If the Korean name brought you here, open `What is Baduk`. If what you really want is a clear AI difficulty choice, go to `vs computer`. If the other player is sitting next to you, `2 player` is the right page. If the rules still feel foggy, `How to play` and `Go rules` will do more for you than another abstract paragraph here. And if you just want a manageable first battlefield, staying on 9×9 is usually the kindest move.