Carpenter’s square
A compact four-stone square formation that is solid but often inefficient.
Also known as
A Carpenter’s square is a formation in which four stones of the same color occupy the four points of a 2×2 square on the Go board. Each stone is orthogonally connected to two neighboring stones within the square, creating a compact block with an enclosed internal corner.
This shape is solid and well connected, but it normally gains less efficiency than a more extended formation. For that reason, it is often played only for a concrete tactical purpose. Carpenter’s square is a specific square-shaped four-stone formation—not the broader category of bad shape, and not the generally denser cluster called dango. Its value depends on the position: describing it as inefficient does not mean that every occurrence is an error.
This term in other languages