PlayGonu Is Live: Korea's Traditional Board Games, Free and Online

Search "Gonu" online a year ago and you'd find almost nothing playable — a handful of Wikipedia stubs describing a board game family most of the world has never heard of, and no actual place to sit down and play one. PlayGonu exists to close that gap: Korea's Gonu tradition, playable free in your browser, starting today with no install and no account.

What's live

• Three Gonu variants — Jul-gonu, the simplest, a two-minute starter; Bakwi-gonu, with a corner-wheel slide that adds real tactical range; and Cham-gonu, the deep one — a 24-point board in the same family as Nine Men's Morris, with mill captures and a genuine mid-to-late-game that rewards real planning.
• Gomoku — the classic five-in-a-row game, not part of the Gonu family but close in spirit, with both Freestyle and Standard (Renju) rulesets.
• A built-in AI for every game, four difficulty levels deep, so there's always an opponent even at 2am with nobody else around.
• Online multiplayer, new as of today — play against another person in real time, anywhere. Create a private room and send the link to a friend, or open a public room and let anyone currently browsing PlayGonu join you. No account, no password — just a name.

Why bother with a 40-variant folk game nobody's heard of?

Because the gap between "centuries-old" and "genuinely good game" isn't as wide as it looks. Gonu was never a children's novelty — one branch of it (Cham-gonu) is structurally the same game as Nine Men's Morris, a game serious enough that mathematicians have since proven it's a draw with perfect play, same as checkers. The rest of the family ranges from Jul-gonu's two-minute simplicity up through Bakwi-gonu's wheel-powered slides — different enough from each other that "Gonu" is better understood as a design space than a single ruleset.

What's next

More Gonu variants are on the list — only the ones with real strategic depth, not just simpler versions of what's already here. Spectator mode for online games, more languages, and whatever else actually improves the game over adding noise. If something's broken or missing, it's worth saying so.