The History of Gomoku, the Five-in-a-Row Game

Gomoku is one of those games that feels older than it is written down. It has no famous inventor, no rulebook signed by a committee — just a board, two colours of stones and five centuries of people trying to line them up. Here is what is actually known about where it came from and how it travelled.

A Chinese folk game called wuziqi

Gomoku is generally traced to China, where it is known as wuziqi (五子棋) — “five-piece game” or “five-in-a-row”. Its exact age is uncertain because it was a folk game rather than a court game: ordinary people played it with stones and a scratched grid, so there are no ancient rulebooks or tournament records to date it precisely. What is clear is that it grew up alongside weiqi (go) and shares the same equipment — a grid and black and white stones placed on intersections — which is why the two games are so often confused abroad.

Along the trade routes to Japan and Korea

The game spread through East Asia, and each country gave it its own name and its own character. In Japan it became gomoku (五目, “five eyes” or “five points”), and later renju (連珠, “connected pearls”), the competitive form. In Korea it is omok (오목). The family resemblance is obvious: same board, same five-in-a-row goal, different names and slightly different rules.

Japan is where gomoku was first taken seriously as a competitive game. Japanese players formalised renju in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by adding forbidden moves for black, who otherwise held a decisive first-move advantage. The Renju International Federation was founded in 1988, and world championships have been held under its rules ever since.

Becoming “gomoku” in English

English speakers met the game through several doors at once, which is why it has at least half a dozen names: gomoku (from Japanese), gobang, five in a row, five-in-a-row, connect five, and occasionally “go-moku”. The Japanese name won out in most English-speaking countries, largely because Japanese renju players and writers were the ones who exported the competitive version.

The game was popularised in the West in the twentieth century as a simple pencil-and-paper game and later as a computer game — it is easy to program, hard to master, and makes an excellent test bed for artificial intelligence research.

The game computers solved

Gomoku has a respectable place in computing history. In 1993 the Dutch computer scientist L. Victor Allis proved that free-style gomoku on a 15 × 15 board is a first-player win — meaning that with perfect play, black can always force a win. His threat-space search techniques influenced game AI research well beyond gomoku.

That result does not make the game boring for humans. Renju's forbidden moves were designed precisely to blunt black's advantage, and under renju rules the game remains balanced and deeply competitive. Casual players, meanwhile, still lose to open threes and diagonal fours every day.

Gomoku today

Today gomoku is played in schools and clubs, on paper and on phones, in casual games and in renju world championships. It has also become one of the most common first projects for people learning game programming — which is how this site exists. The game is simple enough that anyone can build it, and deep enough that nobody has beaten it.

Want to see the difference between the folk game and the competitive version? Read the renju rules guide, or play free-style gomoku against the computer.

Last updated: November 2026