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The Purple Guide to Learning Go in 10 Days
What you can actually do with the world's oldest board game after a focused 10-day starter plan
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: First Day
Welcome to your first day with Go. If you're coming to this book with zero knowledge, that's exactly the point. Go is a board game played on a grid made of straight lines, and it's been around for more than two and a half thousand years. The game was invented in China and is still played by millions of people across the world. If you've ever played tic-tac-toe, you already have a useful starting point--Go is something like finding tic-tac-toe on another planet, where the rules are simple, the board is bigger, and the depth feels endless.
Before we do anything else, let's look at the board. If you don't own a Go set yet, that's fine--today we'll use an app or a website. You can download a free Go app on your phone or use a browser-based board on your computer. The physical board is a grid of lines, typically 19 vertical and 19 horizontal, making 19x19 overall. Today, we are not going to touch the 19x19 board yet. It's enormous. We'll use the small 9x9 board, which is like a practice keyboard with fewer keys. It will let you see the patterns clearly without getting lost.
If you are using a phone app, look for the settings to set the board size. Look for something that says 9x9. If you're using a browser, search for the website Online-Go.com, which is free and requires no download. Set up a game against the computer. If the