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.
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.