The Grid: GO

Every Go app runs an engine built to win. The Grid: GO™ runs an opponent built to be worth playing. If you get ahead, it does not resign. You play the game out and you win it on the board, which is the only way that winning means anything. AN OPPONENT AT YOUR LEVEL Difficulty is not a slider, and not an engine crippled by cutting its thinking time. The opponent plays at a set rank, using a network trained on how people of each rank actually play. A weakened engine makes alien blunders. This one makes human ones. It moves that rank between games from how your games go - never in the middle of one - and it keeps a separate rank for 9x9, 13x13 and 19x19. Tell it your rank if you like and a new player starts gentler; from there it follows how you actually play. Playing the engine is a switch in Settings. Leave it off and the app is a board for two people. THREE MOMENTS, NOT FORTY The engine can find every mistake you made. Showing you all of them teaches nothing and is miserable to read. After a game, the review picks out at most three moves, the ones that cost the most, and shows you each one: the board as you saw it, where you played, where the engine would have played, and an estimate of the points it cost. A game with no such moment is told so, in those words. If the analysis could not finish, the review says that instead of guessing. THE SCORE, SHOWN WORKING When a game ends the score is not a verdict handed down. Every count - stones, territory, komi, the points that belong to no one - is on the screen, and it adds up to the result in front of you. REAL EQUIPMENT A kaya board with vertical grain and a satin finish. Double convex stones with the proportions of real shell and slate, the black carrying a restrained mineral cast that shows only in reflected light. No two stones are drawn alike. A wooden clack when a stone lands, paired with a haptic. Pinch the board to zoom in and place a stone precisely on 19x19, where the points are smaller than a fingertip, then pinch out to see the whole board again. If you want, a setting asks you to confirm each stone before it lands. ECHOES A small set of cards about Go's past, each built on one real object: a painting, a print, a photograph, a board, a stone. Every picture comes from a museum or library that released it openly, and every card says where it came from. Tap a picture to see it full screen. Echoes opens from the small mark beside Undo and Pass, only when you ask; it never interrupts a game. WHAT IS NOT IN HERE No ads. No subscription. No in-app purchases. No currency, no streaks, no daily login bonus, nothing engineered to pull you back. You bought the app, so you have the app. No account, no analytics and no network connection. The engine runs on your device, so it works on a plane. ALSO INCLUDED 9x9, 13x13 and 19x19 boards Full rules, with positional superko and Chinese area scoring Handicap games: 2 to 9 stones (up to 5 on 9x9), komi 7.5 or 0.5 with a handicap Undo, and games that survive quitting the app A game in progress on every board size at once, and a library of the games you have finished A short guide to the rules, as this app plays them VoiceOver play: the opponent's moves are spoken, and you can jump to the last move, your stones, or stones in atari Voice Control and Dynamic Type