Go (game)
The playing pieces are called "stones". One player uses the white stones and the other, black. The players take turns placing the stones on the vacant intersections ("points") of a board. Once placed on the board, stones may not be moved, but stones are removed from the board if "captured". Capture happens when a stone or group of stones is surrounded by opposing stones on all orthogonally-adjacent points. The game proceeds until neither player wishes to make another move. When a game concludes, the winner is determined by counting each player's surrounded territory along with captured stones and komi (points added to the score of the player with the white stones as compensation for playing second). Games may also be terminated by resignation. A teacher might simplify the explanation by saying to a student "you may place your stone on any point on the board, but if I surround that stone, I will remove it."
Abstract strategy game
An abstract strategy game is a strategy game in which the theme is not important to the experience of playing. Many of the world's classic board games, including chess, Go (also called "wei-chi" and "baduk"), checkers and draughts, xiangqi (Chinese chess), shogi (Japanese version of Chinese chess), Reversi (marketed as "Othello"), Nine Men's Morris, and most mancala variants, fit into this category. Play is sometimes said to resemble a series of puzzles the players pose to each other. As J. Mark Thompson wrote in his article "Defining the Abstract": There is an intimate relationship between such games and puzzles: every board position presents the player with the puzzle, What is the best move?, which in theory could be solved by logic alone. A good abstract game can therefore be thought of as a "family" of potentially interesting logic puzzles, and the play consists of each player posing such a puzzle to the other. Good players are the ones who find the most difficult puzzles to present to their opponents.