Speaking about the game Gomoku, first of all, it is necessary to understand the terms “Gomoku” and “Renju”. Some authors called the word “gomoku”, games that have no common roots with this game. Renju, however, is a branch of gomoku, initially based on the same rules, but over time has undergone a number of transformations and innovations. So, for example, the field for gomoku was 19×19, for classical renju 15×15. The principles of victory remain the same for both games: the player must line up 5 stones of his color in a row.

In historical terms, talking about Renju can be a lot, reinforcing all the official innovations, tracking regulations, but with the game itself Gomoku things are more vague. The very fact of the existence of Gomoku cannot be denied – there are many historical documents about this game, for example, on a 19×19 field, but what was the time limit remains a mystery. The masters of this game in ancient times did not consider it necessary to describe the process of the game. Thus, there are simply no documentary sources about previous regulations, one can only guess if they ever were at all. You can build different versions and assumptions about this game and the changes in its rules, but after all, the real masters of antiquity could not help but notice that the player with black stones always has the advantage. It is possible that there was no debut time then, and playing with a certain color was a certain handicap.

Also, there is no evidence left whether in antiquity they played Gomoku in India. It is not known exactly where the origin of another popular oriental game “go” is. There is a version that the birthplace of “go” is not China, but India, whence the game came to China and Korea. Although this also has no reliable documentary evidence.

As we can see, the history of logical games of the east is largely covered with darkness. And unfortunately, much there remains only a guess, not having any documentary evidence.