Go

Go, also called weiqi in China and baduk in Korea, is a two player territorial strategy board game played on a grid, most commonly nineteen by nineteen lines, in which players place stones to surround territory and capture opposing stones. It is widely regarded as the oldest board game still played today in essentially its original form. The game originated in ancient China; a traditional legend credits the mythical Emperor Yao with inventing it to teach his son, but this is a legend rather than a historical account. The earliest known textual reference appears in the Zuo Zhuan, a Chinese historical chronicle traditionally dated to around the fourth century BC, which already mentions the game as an established practice, meaning its real origin lies at some earlier and unrecoverable point. Go reached Japan by around the seventh century AD, carried along with other elements of Chinese culture, and there underwent its most influential later flowering: from the early seventeenth century the Tokugawa shogunate funded four rival professional schools, the Honinbo foremost among them, supporting generations of full time players whose recorded games built the modern theory of the game. This state patronized Japanese tradition, more than any other national school, shaped the vocabulary, rule refinements and competitive culture through which go is played and studied worldwide today.