The aim is to surround more territory and capture more stones (put together) than your opponent. The players take turns placing one stone at a time on vacant line intersections on the board. Stones or chains of stones having no adjacent empty line intersections (points) are removed from board and counted as prisoners each stone being worth one point. In the end, all stones having no hope of avoiding capture (the game is played until the fate of each stone is clear to both players) are removed and the sizes of all territories are counted. Whichever player has more points than the other is the winner.