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Gomoku, also called Five in a Row, is an abstract strategy board game. It is traditionally played with Go pieces (black and white stones) on a Go board. It is played using a 15×15 board while in the past a 19×19 board was standard. Because pieces are typically not moved or removed from the board, gomoku may also be played as a paper-and-pencil game. The game is known in several countries under different names. Players alternate turns placing a stone of their color on an empty intersection. Black plays first. The winner is the first player to form an unbroken line of five stones of their color horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. In some rules, this line must be exactly five stones long; six or more stones in a row does not count as a win, and is called an overline. If the board is completely filled and no one can make a line of 5 stones, then the game ends in a draw. Historical records indicate that the origins of gomoku can be traced back to the mid-1700s during the Edo period. It is said that the 10th generation of Kuwanaya Buemon, a merchant who frequented the Nijō family, was highly skilled in this game, which subsequently spread among the people. By the late Edo period, around 1850, books had been published on gomoku. The earliest published book on gomoku that can be verified is the Gomoku Jōseki Collection in 1856. The name "gomoku" is from the Japanese language, in which it is referred to as gomokunarabe. Go means five, moku is a counter word for pieces and narabe means line-up. The game is popular in China, where it is called Wuziqi (五子棋). Wu (五 wǔ) means five, zi (子 zǐ) means piece, and qi (棋 qí) refers to a board game category in Chinese. The game is also popular in Korea, where it is called omok (오목 [五目]) which has the same structure and origin as the Japanese name. In the nineteenth century, the game was introduced to Britain where it was known as Go Bang, said to be a corruption of the Japanese word goban, which was itself adapted from the Chinese k'i pan (qí pán) "go-board.

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Related concepts (3)

Gomoku

Game complexity

Combinatorial game theory measures game complexity in several ways: State-space complexity (the number of legal game positions from the initial position), Game tree size (total number of possible games), Decision complexity (number of leaf nodes in the smallest decision tree for initial position), Game-tree complexity (number of leaf nodes in the smallest full-width decision tree for initial position), Computational complexity (asymptotic difficulty of a game as it grows arbitrarily large).

Tic-tac-toe

Tic-tac-toe (American English), noughts and crosses (Commonwealth English), or Xs and Os (Canadian or Irish English) is a paper-and-pencil game for two players who take turns marking the spaces in a three-by-three grid with X or O. The player who succeeds in placing three of their marks in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row is the winner. It is a solved game, with a forced draw assuming best play from both players. In American English, the game is known as "tic-tac-toe".