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Sometimes after you have played a stone, you can take some stones off the board. To explain how this works there are two ideas to introduce: ‘next to’, and ‘block’.
Most points are next to four other points - those directly above, below, to the left and to the right. A point on the edge is next to three others, a corner point is next to two others.
Stones can be next to one another too. A block consists of one or more stones of the same colour that are next to one another. If a stone in a block is next to any stones that are the same colour as itself, all those stones are part of the same block. Blocks are much easier to spot than to explain!
Here are some examples. To illustrate the blocks, each one is marked with its own symbol.
Toast, Carry-on and Pa-duk
Play
Pa-duk is a game for two players. Lets call them Black and White. Black uses the black stones, White uses the white ones.
Anywhere on the board where two or more lines meet is called a point. A point with no stone on it is empty. At the start of the game all of the points are empty.
The players take turns to place a stone on an empty point. This is called a move. Black goes first.
On the right are the first few moves of an example game.
Blocks
Just like a stone is next to other points, a block is next to other points too. How many of these points are empty is very important, because a block that is not next to any empty points may be removed from the board.
Here are some examples of
blocks and the empty points
next to them. In the second
column, the empty points
next to each black block have
been marked with that block’s
symbol. Similarly in the third
column, the empty points next
to the white blocks have been
marked.