Two players, one wooden board, one goal: be the first to line up five stones in a row. The rules take thirty seconds to learn. The threats, traps and double attacks will keep you busy for rather longer.
The name depends on where you are: Gomoku in Japan, Omok in Korea, Wuziqi in China, and Gobang or simply Five in a Row in older English books. They are all this game, and this is the board for all of them.
The goal
Connect five of your stones in an unbroken line — horizontally, vertically or diagonally. The first player to manage it wins on the spot.
How to play
- Place your stones. Black moves first. Take turns putting one stone on any empty intersection. Stones never move again and are never captured; the board only fills up.
- Build and watch. Every turn, ask two questions: what does this stone threaten, and what is my opponent threatening?
- Answer threats at once. Three in a row with both ends open must almost always be blocked immediately. One move later it becomes an open four, and an open four cannot be stopped.
Controls
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Ghost stone | Hover the board to preview exactly where your stone will land. |
| Gold dot | Marks the last stone played — useful for following the computer's reply. |
| Winning line | The five winning stones light up with golden rings. |
In the side panel you choose your opponent — the computer or a friend online — set the difficulty, play as Black or White, undo your last move, follow the move list, toggle the sound and reopen the rules.
Play 2 player Gomoku online with a friend
Pick With a friend online, press Open a table and you get a four-character code. Send it to whoever you want to play — they open this same page, type the code and press Join. No account, no download, no waiting room, and a chat window in the corner.
Gomoku is one of the best games on this site to play against a person rather than a machine, and for an awkward reason: the computer is very good at spotting an open three, and a human is not. Against a person the game becomes what it is supposed to be — a race to build a threat the other side notices one move too late.
Whoever opened the table plays Black and places first.
Rules
- The board is a 15 by 15 grid. Stones sit on the intersections, not in the squares.
- Black moves first, then players alternate, one stone per turn.
- Stones are never moved, removed or captured.
- An unbroken line of five or more stones wins immediately.
- If all 225 intersections fill up with no five in a row, the game is a draw.
Strategy
- Own the centre. The middle of the board touches the most lines in every direction. Corner and edge stones run out of room.
- Learn the threat ladder. An open two is a seed. An open three demands an answer. An open four — four in a row with both ends free — is unstoppable, because it has two winning points and only one can be blocked.
- Win with double threats. A single stone that creates two open threes at once, or a four and a three together, usually decides the game. Your opponent can only answer one threat per turn.
- Don't waste your fours. A four forces an exact reply, so you know the answer in advance. Chain such forcing moves toward a winning shape rather than spending them for nothing.
Want the deeper game?
The full Gomoku guide works through the threat hierarchy with board diagrams — open three, open four, closed four and the fork that decides most games — plus why the first player wins with perfect play and the opening rules invented to fix it.
Play it away from the screen
Gomoku is the easiest game in the world to take off a screen, because nothing ever moves and nothing is ever captured — a pencil is enough. The printable Gomoku board puts a full 15×15 grid on one sheet, thirty stones a side on a second and the rules on a third. Most people only print the first one: two players, one grid, X against O.
About the game
Line-up games on Go equipment are older than their written rules. China knows the game as wuziqi, five-piece chess; Japan played gomoku narabe from the Heian period onward. Britain met it in the late nineteenth century as a parlour craze called Go Bang. In 1899 the journalist Ruikou Kuroiwa proposed the restricted tournament version Renju, which is still the professional form today.
Why five, and not four?
Because four is broken on any board worth playing on. Tic-tac-toe on bigger boards solves the small sizes completely and shows where the tipping point sits: enlarge the board without lengthening the line and the first player simply wins. Gomoku is what you get when the balance is struck properly.
