Gomoku
Two colours, one grid, five in a row. The rules fit in a sentence; the tactics do not. Best entry point if you have never touched a Chinese board game.
Start a matchFree · No account requiredFive stones in a line.
Five stones in a line.
Three thousand years of arguing about it.
Gomoku is learnable in thirty seconds and hard to put down after that. Open the board below and make a move — nothing to install, nothing to sign up for. Xiangqi and Go follow.
Your move
Three games, one board culture
Each one teaches a different way of thinking. We are shipping them in the order that gets you playing fastest.
Xiangqi
A river cuts the board in half. Cannons only capture by jumping over a screen. The two generals may never look at each other down an open file.
Go
You surround territory instead of capturing a king. Still played under essentially the same rules it had two millennia ago.
Eighteen rungs, borrowed from the real thing
Chinese board culture ranks players in grades and dan, not in bronze and platinum. We kept that, and mapped it onto a rating that actually moves when you win.
Grades
- Ninth Grade
- Eighth Grade
- Seventh Grade
- Sixth Grade
- Fifth Grade
- Fourth Grade
- Third Grade
- Second Grade
- First Grade
Dan
- First Dan
- Second Dan
- Third Dan
- Fourth Dan
- Fifth Dan
- Sixth Dan
- Seventh Dan
- Eighth Dan
- Ninth Dan
What we actually built
Online games are refereed server-side
Every move in a friend match is validated by the server before it lands on either board. A patched client cannot invent a win.
The engine runs in your browser
Our Gomoku opponent searches with alpha-beta pruning under a hard 500 ms budget, on your machine. No round trip, no queue, no rate limit.
Written in four languages, not poured through a translator
English, Español, 日本語 and Português do Brasil. Rules, tooltips and error messages included — not just the marketing page.
Nothing behind a signup wall
Play, rank up, share a game. Attaching an email is optional and only exists so you can carry your record to another device.