Go Roadmap: Why It Comes Last
Go sits last in our build order, behind gomoku, xiangqi and reversi. Not because it matters less, but because it costs the most to do properly. Here is the go development plan: the hard parts, the order we are building in, and what has to be true before it ships.
The question we get most often is about the go roadmap, and it usually arrives in one line: when is go coming. The short answer is that go sits last in our build order, behind gomoku, xiangqi and reversi. That order is deliberate, and it has nothing to do with how much we care about the game. This post lays out the go development plan in full: where the hard parts are, the order we are building in, and what has to hold before a weiqi release makes sense. While you read, gomoku is open on the play page at yiboardgame.com.
Where go sits in the build order
Four games, in this order: gomoku, which has shipped; xiangqi, in progress; reversi, planned; go, last. Popularity did not decide that. What decided it is how much each game teaches us per unit of work. Gomoku taught us the referee kernel and how to run search pruning inside a browser tab. Xiangqi is teaching us piece movement, capture rules, and branches like perpetual check. Reversi will teach us flip resolution and exhaustive endgame solving. Go comes last because it needs things none of the other three teach.
What makes go the hard one
- Scoring: Chinese area counting and Japanese territory counting can disagree, and players can also disagree at the end about which groups are dead
- Ko: a position can repeat, so the referee has to track board history instead of only the current grid
- Dead stones: the game ends and life and death still has to be settled. A person taps a group and says it is dead. Software has to guess, or ask
- AI: alpha-beta with a hand-written evaluation function gives gomoku a decent opponent. Go evaluation functions are notoriously bad when written by hand, and the strong open engines run Monte Carlo tree search over neural networks. That is a different kind of work
- Board size: 19x19 means 361 intersections, which changes rendering, coordinate labels and the replay format
What carries over from gomoku
- The referee kernel: move validation, game state, time control
- The rating and dan-grade system
- Game share links and the replay viewer
- The board rendering layer, with a larger grid and star points
The go development plan, in order
- Step one: a 9x9 board with the full rule set and Chinese area scoring. The smallest board, so the rules get proven first
- Step two: 13x13, then 19x19, on the same engine
- Step three: dead stone resolution. Both players confirm after the game ends, and only then does the final score appear
- Step four: handicap stones and komi
- Step five: a 9x9 AI first, with stronger levels added as the engine improves
When is go coming
We are not putting a month on it. A date we miss stays on the page far longer than the delay itself. What we can say is what has to hold first: the 9x9 rules pass our test suite, the dead stone flow works between two browsers, and the 9x9 AI plays at a level worth losing to. When those three are true, go ships. Until then the go rules page covers liberties, capture and ko, and gomoku is ready now.
FAQ
When is go coming to YiBoard?
No date yet. Go is the last of the four games, after xiangqi and reversi. The three conditions that have to hold first are listed above, and it ships once they do.
Can I play go on the site right now?
Not yet. The go rules page explains liberties, capture and ko, and gomoku is open now with no signup and nothing to install.
Will you use Chinese rules or Japanese rules?
Chinese area scoring first. On a 9x9 board the two methods rarely disagree, so it makes sense to prove the rules before adding territory scoring.
Will go have its own ranking?
Yes. Go ratings sit in a separate pool from gomoku. The skill distribution and the improvement curve differ enough that one shared number would be wrong for both.
Related
- From 1200 to 1800: A Rank-Up Roadmap
2026-10-13
- Why Gomoku Ships First
2026-08-04
- Xiangqi Dev Log: Cannons and the River
2026-10-14