Meigo is a territory game for two players: Black and White. It is played on the intersections (points) of an initially empty square grid (board). There is also an off-board location called prison. Each player has access to a sufficient supply of stones of their own color. One of the two sides of each stone is marked. DefinitionsA chain is a stone along with all stones one can reach from it through a series of steps onto orthogonally adjacent stones of its color. A liberty of a chain is an empty point orthogonally adjacent to it. A stone is marked if its marked side is up, and unmarked otherwise. A point reaches a stone if there is a free path along the lines of the board between the two. PlayBlack plays first, then turns alternate. On your first turn of the game, place an unmarked stone of your color on an empty point. On any other turn, play or hold. To hold, remove an enemy stone from the prison. To play, follow these steps: Select an empty point. If the selected point reaches an unmarked friendly stone and no marked stones of either color, or the selected point is orthogonally adjacent to an unmarked friendly stone, place an unmarked friendly stone on that point. Otherwise, place a marked friendly stone on that point. If the chain that includes your placement has both marked and unmarked stones, unmark (by flipping them) all marked stones in that chain. Move to the prison all enemy chains without liberties. If the prison now contains stones of both colors, remove pairs of opposite-colored stones from it until at most one color remains. At the end of your turn, the stone you just placed must be part of a chain with at least one liberty. You cannot place a marked stone and move a marked stone to the prison on the same turn if your opponent just placed a marked stone. The last player to play or hold wins. Before the game begins, to make it fair, the first player places a number of black stones in the prison, and then the second player chooses sides. For handicap games, the weaker player takes Black and opens instead by placing on the board a number of unmarked black stones proportional to the skill gap between the players. NotesMeigo is a seemingly finite game that plays almost like Go. It was inspired by Cavity, a Go variant created by Michael Amundsen. Christopher Field provided valuable input that helped refine the rules of the game. The prison mechanism was introduced by David Wolfe and Elwyn Berlekamp in their book Mathematical Go: Chilling Gets the Last Point. -description from designer

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