What Is Gonu? Korea's Ancient Board Game Family, Explained

If you've never heard of Gonu (고누), you're not alone — outside Korea it's almost entirely unknown, even though it's one of the oldest board game traditions in East Asia. There's no single "Gonu game" the way there's a single chess or a single Go. Gonu is a family of related games, all played on lines scratched into dirt, drawn on paper, or carved into a board, all sharing the same basic idea: move pieces along a grid of lines, trap or outmaneuver your opponent, win.

Where it comes from

Gonu has no single inventor and no official rulebook — it was a children's and farmers' pastime, passed down by demonstration rather than by text, the way hopscotch or tic-tac-toe spread. That makes its exact age hard to pin down, but references to Gonu-like games appear in Korean folk records going back centuries, and the practice of drawing a board in dirt with a stick and playing with pebbles meant it needed no equipment at all — just two players and a patch of ground. That's also why it splintered into so many regional variants: without a governing body standardizing the rules, every village was free to tweak its own.

So how many "Gonu" games are there?

Korean folklore researchers have catalogued more than forty named variants, ranging from children's warm-up games you can learn in two minutes to genuinely deep strategy games that take real study to play well. A few of the better-known ones:

• Jul-gonu (줄고누) — the simplest version: a small 4×4 line board, 4 pieces each, move one step at a time and sandwich your opponent's pieces between two of yours to capture them. Most Koreans' first introduction to Gonu as kids.
• Bakwi-gonu (바퀴고누) — "wheel gonu": a piece standing on one of the board's four corner "wheels" can spin and slide any distance in a straight line, turning a slow one-step game into something with real tactical range.
• Cham-gonu (참고누) — the deep one. A 24-point board of three nested squares, 12 pieces each, and a "mill" capture mechanic (line up three in a row to take an opponent's piece) that puts it in the same family as the globally-known Nine Men's Morris.

That range — from a two-minute children's game to something with real strategic depth — is part of what makes Gonu interesting as a family rather than just one more board game. You can start with the easy one and work your way up.

Is Gonu like anything I already know?

If you've played checkers, tic-tac-toe, or Nine Men's Morris, Gonu will feel immediately familiar in spirit — simple equipment, a grid of lines, capture-by-trapping or capture-by-alignment. That's not a coincidence: games built from "pieces on a line grid" independently appeared all over the world precisely because the format needs nothing but a drawn board and some stones, making it one of the most naturally reinvented game structures in human history. Gonu is Korea's branch of that same family tree.

Try it yourself

PlayGonu has three Gonu variants running free in your browser, no install or account needed — plus Gomoku, a related pencil-and-paper classic, alongside them. Start with the easy one: