Scoring
Surround uses area scoring. When a game ends, each player's score is:
their living stones on the board + the empty points only their stones surround
and White adds komi. The higher score wins.
What counts
- Living stones. Every stone of yours on the board, except the ones both players agreed are dead.
- Your area. An empty region (a connected set of empty points) counts for you if every stone along its edge is yours. The eyes inside your groups count, as does any territory you've walled off.
- Neutral points. A region whose edge touches stones of both colors counts for nobody. That covers dame, the leftover points between the two sides, and the shared liberties of a seki, where neither side can approach the other without being captured.
- Captures add nothing. Captured stones are recorded, and shown on the kifu, but they aren't added to the score. Under area scoring a capture pays off through the board instead: the stones are gone and their points become yours.
This is not the Japanese territory scoring many players learn first, which counts captures plus surrounded empty points. The two usually agree on the winner, but they can differ by a point.
Dead stones
Some stones are still on the board at the end but can't escape capture. Both players agree which stones are dead, and they're scored as if they'd been captured: they count for nobody, and their points join the area of whoever surrounds them.
A dead-stone proposal has to mark whole groups: a dead stone's same-colored neighbors must be dead too. How players agree, and what happens when they don't, is under How a game ends.
A worked example
| Black | White | |
|---|---|---|
| Living stones | 7 | 7 |
| Area | 17 | 17 |
| Komi | 7 | |
| Total | 24 | 31 |
White wins by 7: W+7.
The dead white stone counts for no one, and its point is part of Black's area, since only black stones surround it. The point in the middle touches both colors, so it's neutral. Every point on the board is accounted for: Black's 24, White's 24 before komi, and 1 neutral point make 49.
Why playing on costs nothing
Under area scoring, playing a stone inside your own area doesn't change your score: the point stops counting as area and starts counting as a stone. Capturing a dead stone doesn't change it either: the stone was already counted for no one, and its point goes back into your area once it's gone.
That's why a disagreement about dead stones can always be settled by playing it out. Suppose the players above disagreed and played on. If Black never captured the white stone, it would count as alive at the end, and the empty points around it would touch both colors and turn neutral. Black would lose that whole corner. Capturing it first costs Black nothing.
Komi
Black moves first, which is an advantage. Komi is a number of points added to White's score to make up for it. It's fixed in each game's terms in half-point steps.
| Board | Komi in rated games |
|---|---|
| 9×9 | 7 |
| 13×13 | 7.5 |
| 19×19 | 7.5 |
These are the matchmaker's current settings; the policy fixes the komi each rated board size may use. Casual games set their own komi.
Draws
With a half-point komi a draw is impossible. With a whole-number komi, such as 7 on 9×9, the scores can tie, and the game is a draw. A draw counts as half a win in the rating update, and has no kifu.
Where scoring is checked
Scores are computed, never claimed. When a game ends by agreement, the score is worked out from the final board and the agreed dead stones, and when the game reaches the chain, Cairo computes it again from the same inputs. A proof checks the arithmetic; it never decides which stones are dead. The players do.