up the Queen’s Knight. In Go, on the other hand, the handicaps are in a progressive scale of great accuracy, they have been given from the earliest times, and the openings with handicaps have been studied quite as much as those without handicaps.
In regard to the time required to play a game of Go, it may be said that ordinary players finish a game in an hour or two, but as in Chess, a championship game may be continued through several sittings, and may last eight or ten hours. There is on record, however, an authentic account of a game that was played for the championship at Yeddo during the Shogunate, which lasted continuously nine days and one night.
Before taking up a description of the board and stones and the rules of play, we will first outline a history of the game.