Hoshi Go
The game of Go
Play and learn Go, the ancient board game also known as Baduk or Weiqi.
Hoshi Go is a complete Go board for your iPhone. Play a quick game on 9×9, a longer one on 13×13 or a full 19×19 battle, against a friend on the same phone or against a bot made for beginners.
If you have never played, five short lessons take you from your first liberty to scoring your first game, with real capture puzzles along the way.
- Price
- Free
- Requires
- iOS 13 or later
- Languages
- English
- Your data
- Never collected
The home screen
Board size, opponent, colour and handicap
A capture puzzle inside a lesson
Pass-and-play on a full 19×19 board
What it does
Play
- 9×9, 13×13 and full 19×19 boards
- Pass-and-play with a friend on one phone
- A built-in bot for beginners and casual players
- Handicap stones from 2 to 9 to balance any match
- Undo and resign
Learn
- Five short interactive lessons
- Real capture puzzles inside the lessons
- Liberties, capture, ko, suicide, eyes, life and death, and territory
Score
- Chinese area scoring
- Mark dead stones by tapping them at the end
- Komi of 7.5, or 0.5 in handicap games
How the board thinks
Everything runs on your phone. There is no server to ask, so the rules, the bot and the scoring all live inside the app.
A full rules engine
Every move is checked for captures, suicide and positional superko, which means no move may ever recreate an earlier board position. You cannot play an illegal move by accident.
A bot with good manners
The bot looks for captures, escapes from atari, attacks weak stones, never fills its own eyes and plays good shape. It is kept at beginner strength on purpose, so a new player can win.
Fair scoring
At the end of a game you tap the stones you both agree are dead, and the app counts stones plus surrounded territory under Chinese rules.
Privacy
- Collects no data at all.
- No accounts, analytics, advertising or tracking.
- Makes no network connections. Your games never leave your phone.
Help
Hoshi Go is free. If something looks wrong, or you have a rules question, write to us.