About StoneSong Play

How it works

StoneSong teaches Go — the ancient surrounding game (weiqi in China, baduk in Korea) — through its shapes. A group with two separate eyes lives forever; a ladder chases a stone in a staircase to the edge; a net traps it without a chase; a snapback gives one stone to take several back. Learn to read the shape, and you learn the game.

• Goban Studio — solve six life-and-death puzzles on a real 9×9 board: tap an intersection to place the winning stone, with a hint after two tries and a "Show me". A Free-play mode lets two players take turns, capture, and count territory.
• Reading Lab — the reader's skill: predict whether a ladder captures the stone or lets it escape before the board plays it out, then watch it happen. Committing a guess first is what makes the lesson stick.
• Read the shape — quick-fire drills: count a group's liberties, spot the stone in atari, find the capturing point.
• Review your misses — a shape you misread comes back on a spaced schedule until you've read it cleanly several times.
• Concept kits — sixteen short multiple-choice rounds, from liberties and eyes to ko, good shape, and the endgame.

Meet the cast

Patient Bamboo grows slowly then all at once (the long game), Hungry Crane reads captures exactly, Master Snail considers every move, and Sparring Tiger strikes at the right moment. Each character behaves like the idea they teach. You can read their illustrated stories over on the cast pages.

A note on the game's roots

Go is one of the oldest board games still played, with roots in China more than two thousand years ago. The name means the "surrounding game": you win by surrounding more of the board's points than your opponent, keeping your own groups alive. We teach it on the 9×9 board, where a whole game fits in a few minutes and the ideas stay clear.

Each board's report card

How long is a game, does it end with a winner, and is it fair to whoever moves first? We did not guess: the engine played each board against itself and counted, choosing moves at random with a rule Go programs commonly use for this — a player never fills its own one-point eye, and passes only when nothing else is left. In Atari Go the first capture wins. In Go, two passes end the game and the board counts it with the same area scoring you play with, White getting komi for moving second: 7.5 points on both boards. Random play is not how people play, so these numbers describe the rules, not players.

Our privacy promise

StoneSong Play is free, works offline, and collects nothing. No accounts, no ads, no tracking, and no data ever leaves your device — your level, streak, and solved puzzles are saved only in this browser.

Losing is part of it

Even strong players misread a ladder on the way up. A wrong guess here never costs you anything — it just shows you the shape once more so you read it cleanly next time.