Little Go
Experience one of the top-rated Free games on the App Store, Little Go! Developed by the innovative team at Patrick Naf Moser, this Board game provides a unique gaming experience like no other. With a content rating of 4+, it’s perfect for a wide range of players. Since its initial release on 23rd December 2011, the game has seen numerous updates, with the latest version launched on 23rd September 2022.
Are you a fan of Board, Strategy, games? Then Little Go is right up your alley! You won’t be able to resist its appeal.
User Ratings of Little Go
Over 108 players have rated Little Go. Join them and share your thoughts!
How Much Does Little Go Cost?
Good news! You can download Little Go on your iOS device absolutely free!
Little Go Release Date
Eager to know when Little Go first graced the App Store? It was launched on 23rd December 2011.
When Was Little Go Last Updated?
The latest version of Little Go was updated on 23rd September 2022, ensuring a more enjoyable gaming experience for all players.
Where Can I Download Little Go?
To get started with Little Go, head over to the official Apple App Store.
A Glimpse into Little Go
Little Go is a free and open source iOS application that lets you play the game of Go on the iPhone or iPad. You can play against another human (on the same device), or against the computer. The computer player is powered by the open source software library Fuego (http://fuego.sf.net/). The minimum requirement for running this version of Little Go is iOS 9.0.
Features:
- Board sizes between 7×7 and 19×19 (start a new game to change the board size)
- Let the computer player suggest a move or immediately play the move for you
- Calculate the score at any time during the game (area scoring is the default, territory scoring can be selected at the start of a new game)
- Adjust the computer’s playing strength and resign behaviour by selecting from a number of presets, or by fine-tuning advanced settings
- Play even games, or games with 2-9 handicap stones (fixed stone placement)
- Select from 5 pre-defined rulesets when you start a new game, or adjust game rules to your preference (komi, ko rule, area/territory scoring system, number of passes to end game, resume play by alternating/non-alternating play, four passes end game)
- Place arbitrary black and white stones for initial board setup before a game starts
- View board positions for moves played earlier during the game (no support for game variations, though)
- Discard moves (aka "undo")
- Display move numbers and coordinate labels
- Zoom & scroll board
- Create and edit board and move annotations (e.g. good/bad move, good position for black/white, etc.) and add textual notes to a position
- Mark intersections on the board with symbols, markers and labels, and draw arrows or lines on the board
- Display player influence (aka territory statistics) for an estimate who owns an area
- Computer vs. computer game for entertainment
- Save & load games to/from the archive
- Use iTunes file sharing to transfer saved games to/from your iOS device
- Import/export game files from/to other apps on your device (e.g. Mail, DropBox)
- In-app user manual (text-only)
- Submit bug report email from inside the app (yes, this is a feature :-))
- For the technically inclined: Watch what happens behind the scenes when Little Go and Fuego talk to each other over the Go Text Protocol (GTP)
Your contribution in any form (coding, UI design, testing, bug reports, creating an app video preview, website design) is welcome – please contact me or visit the support website to find out more.
A note about the project state: Several years of development have gone into Little Go since its inception in January 2011. The app now has a feature set that is, I believe, quite nice :-) for a free program. My main focus therefore lies on fixing any remaining bugs (of which I am sure there are plenty) and keeping the app running under future versions of iOS.
Little Go is released under the Apache License 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0).
What’s New in the Latest Update?
Find out what’s new in the latest version of Little Go updated on 23rd September 2022:
This is the Little Go bugfix release 1.7.1. It contains two fixes for bugs that caused the app to crash (#397 and #398).
The previous release was the Little Go feature release 1.7.0. An overview of the changes follows, for more details read the in-game Changelog.
Features
- The app now supports reading and writing of all SGF node annotation and move annotation properties (#339). The app also displays these properties’ values and lets you edit them. This means that you can now add a valuation to a move (e.g. good/bad move) and/or to the entire board position (e.g. good position for black/white), designate a board position to be a "hotspot" (e.g. it contains a game-deciding move), annotate a board position with an estimated score, and finally you can add textual notes to a board position. Annotation data is displayed by, and can be edited via, an all-new annotation view.
- The app now supports reading and writing of all SGF markup properties (#349). Except for the DD property (dim parts of the board), the app also displays these properties’ values and lets you edit them. This means that you can now mark intersections on the board with 5 different symbols (circle, square, triangle, "X" mark, "selected" symbol), place single-character letter markers or single-digit number markers, place a free-form label text, and finally you can draw arrows or plain lines on the board. The app has an all-new markup editing mode for this (accessible via menu icon) that includes drag & drop support to move around existing markup.
- In the Settings screen there are now a number of user preferences that affect how markup is drawn and that let you tweak some aspects of the markup editing process.
Improvements and changes
- The general user interface (UI) of Little Go now looks and behaves the same on all device types (#371). This unification of UI layouts became necessary because the effort to support different layouts proved to be too much. Also the unification provided the opportunity to get rid of many behind-the-scenes hacks. The main changes are: 1) Smaller iPhone devices which only support the Portrait orientation UI layout, now display board positions and the navigation buttons differently than before. 2) Larger iPhone devices now display a tab bar when in Landscape orientation (alas, reducing the size of the board). 3) iPad devices now always show board positions when in Portrait orientation, and when in Landscape orientation they display board positions and navigation buttons differently than before.
- Changed the icon of the "More Game Actions" button (#377). The previous icon was a "curved arrow" symbol, which seemed to confuse many users so that they couldn’t find important actions, such as "New game". The new icon is the established "hamburger menu" icon, which should now more clearly indicate that the button pops up a menu with actions to select from.
- Button boxes and the board position list now support Dark mode by switching to a dark background color (#378 and #379). Thanks to Peter Waldispühl for reporting this.
- For more improvements/changes see the Changelog.
Bugfixes
- Board position zero (representing the start of the game) sometimes did not display handicap and komi. This is now fixed (#374).
- Various speculative fixes for potential app crashes. See the Changelog for details.
Regressions
- A bug was introduced in version 1.6.0 that would cause Ko detection to fail after the app was suspended and was forced to restart by the operating system (a relatively common occurrence). This is now fixed (#372). Because Little Go has struggled with Ko detection many times in the past, this regression was particularly painful.
Technical changes
- See Changelog.
User Reviews on Little Go
Looking for more information? Read a comprehensive review of Little Go below:
Wasted our time. Does not even work.
We really like it. The rating should be above 4.5 at the least. If some sugar feature is added to be beginner-friendly, the scorce might climb up. Astonishingly, it’s open source!
Its perfect. And open source. The best to play with friends. No ads. And full featured.
Nice that it is free, but its just way too hard no matter what the setting.
Placing stones is not immediately clear, it has a weird magnifying glass mechanic that doesnt make much sense. It took us a while to figure out how to place a stone because there was no tutorial or anything. Also Im playing on the absolute weakest computer and it has DESTROYED us over and over on the 9×9 board without mercy, we cant imagine what the other bots are like.
Clunky UI and an AI that requires too much configuration.
We love this app, we use it a lot when commuting on buses, trains, planes, or anywhere, its a great way to keep our go skulls up to pace… Our biggest request would be to know what the rankings are, Maybe Fuego is about 8-12 kyu or fuego strong is 2Dan- 1 kyu… Would you happen to have an estimate? Please let us know in the response!
Theres a lot of ways to play around with the level of difficulty, so you can make the computer as weak or as strong as you. Its excellent. You make new computer characters that resign easy, or never resign, and you can have it as experienced as 1 game worth of knowledge, or thousands of games.
As a beginner, we have a lot of fun with this app. Even on weaker difficulty, we really struggle to keep up with the AI, and thats great. Anytime we mess up we will consistently get harshly punished and it has really opened our eyes to the weaknesses in certain play styles. We’ve learned so much from this app and we’ve gotten to watch the margin of loss drop more and more as we keep playing. Sometimes it is frustrating to lose all the time, but every game we learn something and get a little better. We noticed that the game is open source, but we havent gotten a chance to check out the algorithms used. It surprises us that there isnt a way to tweak the difficulty level to easier levels, as thats usually pretty easy to do from a developer standpoint. We’ve read that Fuego uses MCTS to make its moves and there should be parameters one could tune to make playing a little easier. Thanks again for this tool, its really great!
Our favorite part about this app is how much you can customize & tweak. Overall, everything else about it is also pretty strong; display, UI, and even the manual is pretty clear/thorough. People whining about the AI being difficult dont understand just how high the skill ceiling is for this board game, and even the weakest setting should still take some decent practice to overcome. Besides, if youre constantly losing to the AI, then thats a perfect opportunity to see what types of moves are being used to beat you Look for patterns and adapt your strategy accordingly!! To the developer(s): Very nice work. 5/5.
This app is excellent. The AI is tough. But we followed some of the guidance about weakening it, gave myself a 5-stone handicap, and am enjoying some competitive games. The FAQs and the Help are fine; you have to dig around a little bit, but its not really difficult. We are a weak, novice Go player, and we find this app great fun. And there are a lot of options that we havent even looked at. We dumbed down Fuego as much as possible, changed the board to 19×19, and thats about it.
Im a software developer. We appreciate a good app. This is one of them. Open source. Well built. Lots of configuration options. Smooth UI. A true gem.
But the computer player (even Fuego weak) is always winning and does not make any mistakes ever. We guess we need to play with the settings some more. Getting a bit frustrated here…
Its a good app that plays hard. We would recommend it for any range player (but as a beginner of course prepare to lose a lot) our biggest gripe is that the Fuego engine really eats up battery life.
While out of the box the computer will mercilessly defeat a beginner, this is a FREE amazing learning tool. You MUST read the instructions and understand how to adjust it to your skill level otherwise prepare for a very uneven match that will make the most stubborn challenger want to give up. After tweaking we found the features quite useful and the game is now addictive in ways we can only describe a three hours of satisfying gameplay we that was traded for sleep or time with our family.
Its really hard for beginners and the ai will pass multiple times then suddenly all our pieces will disappear.
The ai in the game is not set proportionally and whenever it starts to lose it just passes its move to you and if you do the same the ai stops the game and claims to have won even if you possess 80% of the board also if it cannot pass and regardless of what it does would lose most of its pieces crashes the game forcing you out and if you try to rewind and play the same move it just crashes itself again.
This game has no use for people trying to learn the game of Go. The AI is much too hard even at the easier setting. You will have lost the game by your this move without knowing why. If you hope to learn how to play using the two computer setting that sets up a game with rude computer against itself, you will be disappointed because the game will start several moves in, which prevents you from seeing the early moves that set up everything else.
The game wont let us place stones. It used to on the first day we installed it, now it wont. Sorry, 1 Star for a game we cant play.
Impossible difficulty level and the app developer says he sees no problem with it. Dont even bother installing. We’ve been playing for 3 years and struggle to beat the basic AI, it uses best-possible-play for every. Single. Play. Just dont install this app.
This is not a game for beginners! The AI is relentless and will never make anything other than the best possible move. Good challenge for pro players.
We played until we noticed the com made an error in its gameplay, it kept playing out of dead stones. It makes the final Komi count inaccurate by a minimum of 15 Komi.
This is the best free Go/Baduk app on iOS. From the graphical user interface, from all the customization options with scoring and AI difficulty. We see with other reviews people are raging at the difficulty with the AI… But this is one of the few go apps/programs that even HAVE an AI difficulty setting. For newbs: set the ai to lowest difficulty and only play on smaller board sizes like 7×7, 9×9. Really our only complaint is that we wish it had a windows program too, as this is excellent baduk freeware.
Pros: *Highly customizable games and AI *Actually free Cons: *You have to press somewhat hard to place stones *Forward/fast forward buttons are too close together, so often you end up skipping to the end of a game when you are reviewing it Suggestions: *Add a rematch option under ‘Game actions’. The purpose would be to save a few presses (faster than New Game > Done > Yes) when you want to play multiple matches with the same AI and settings.
We got interested in the game after watching AlphaGo documentary and likely found your app which is only one without need to register on AppStore and working properly! Thank you!
- Overview: This is a great Go app. Unfortunately, it’s default settings are very strong, and its UI is not intuitive, which is why many other reviewers are unhappy. But if you’re willing to dig in and adjust the settings, we think most players can enjoy it. Of course, it took us a while to figure out all those settings. * Initial settings: First things first: unless you’re at least 2-3k, we recommend that when you start a new game, you use the initial screen that pops up to adjust the settings by switching the computer to "Fuego (weak)," turning off "even game," and then adding a handicap. * Strength: we’re an AGA 1d. After a couple of hours of playing 9×9 games, we were finally able to beat it at the default ("Fuego") setting without a handicap but only once. Our guess is that the default strength is at least 3d. We also tried playing against "Fuego (weak)," again without a handicap, and we were able to beat it most of the time, but not all the time. Our guess is that it’s about 2k. The app calls the "weak" setting a "1" and the default setting a "5", so we would tentatively say: "1" = 2k = Fuego (weak) "2" = 1k "3" = 1d "4" = 2d "5" = 3d = Fuego If you’re below 2k, we recommend adding handicap stones accordingly. You may also want to adjust the default komi setting (7.5) using the "advanced settings" on that initial screen before playing. While you’re there, you can also switch from area to territory scoring if you wish. * Personalizing: To create your own profile, click on "Settings" then "Players & Profiles" then "add new player," and chose a user name for yourself. * Further adjustments how to make the "weak" profile weaker or the default profile stronger It’s possible to adjust the strength settings. To weaken the "Fuego (weak)" profile, click on "Settings," then "Players & Profiles," then "Fuego (weak)," then "Display profile settings," then "advanced configuration" (just under "playing strength"). From there, you can adjust the "thinking time" slider from its default (10 seconds) all the way down to 1 second. Alternatively, to strengthen the default "Fuego" profile, click on "Settings," then "Players & Profiles," then "Fuego," then "profile" and select "extra strong". The strength stays at "5," but the Monte Carlo engine is given more time to think. Enjoy!
This app has everything you need to play go. You can save games and play them back turn by turn. It’s fully customizable, you can change the board size, the rules, who’s black and white, ect. Yes the ai is incredibly difficult. We can spend hours on this app trying and failing to beat it. It’s great practice for fighting real opponents and eventually you can find a way to beat the ai.
We don’t like that the computer has the ability to resign. We want to smash our opponent and see the game through to the bitter end.
We enjoy the game, but the computer is much to advanced for beginners, and the second we turn on a handicap the bot resigns on its first move. If there was some way to stop the bot from resigning, we would give it a 4/5, but as is the app is simply infuriating. Edit: we found the setting to turn off AI resignation. Its well hidden, but as promised we are changing our score to 4/5.
Fun and addictive game. This app taught us how to play but it is impossible to beat the computer, even with max handicap. The weak setting is not weak at all. Wish there was a beginner setting.
We know you say youre done adding features, but a demo board, like the one on OGS would be nice. This would make it somewhat easier to teach people basic rules of the game, working out variants, or doing life and death from books or other sources.
Give up. You’re going to lose. You were going to lose within the first few moves. Even with the engine on the weakest setting, you are going to lose badly, very quickly, every single time. It is not fun at all. Don’t even bother playing. You lose. And in case there are some random chance you might accidentally win, don’t worry, the computer gives itself seven points ahead of you, even though you don’t get a handicap with extra pieces to start like you’re supposed to. Or, if you find a very well hidden the setting that allows you to get a couple of extra pieces is a handicap for the other player, the very first time you take one of its pieces, it simply resigns. So, we hope you like losing, and losing badly, because that is all that’s going to happen in this game. If you think having even the slightest chance of winning is fun, forget it, because it will quit the minute it thinks there’s even a tiny chance you will win. You lose.
This seems to work well for practice. It is nice to try a strategy and quit if it doesnt work and try a different one. We were able to play almost 10 games per hour. The scoring seems to be flawed but you can just calculate score manually.
Was hoping for a beginner mode. Even with all the bells and whistles available in the settings, no such luck. The fuego weak mode seems harder than the regular fuego.
It’s impossible to win, even on the weak setting. It really needs a beginner’s mode or just more options in general as far as difficulty goes, then it would be just fine.
Go itself is a fun game but this version seems like its set up to cheat you with the computer executing moves you cant do but its able to get off somehow. Its designed to make you fail rather than being a challenge. Theyve lost us as a gamer so please dont wast your time with this game just play with a live person instead 14 thumbs down!!!!
After playing several rounds we realized that computers can pull and do moves on that are illegal and you cannot do.
Too hard, 7.5 Komi for white too much. Can’t adjust. Lost by 0.5 points. Have not been able to come any closer to beating it. Also wish there was a 19×19 board.
Layout is great, graphics are pleasant, and the data displayed is appropriate and nice. We can’t say anything about how high quality the AI is, but at first glance this little app is nice and enjoyable to use.
This is less of a game and more of an abusive relationship. When you think you’re leading the AI on /finally/, for ONCE, and JUST about to pull off your first sweet move, you discover that the AI is actually one step ahead of you and crushes all of your dreams. And if you get pouty and hastily place the next few pieces without thinking? Everything you own will dissolve before your eyes and leave you battered and broken.
The AI will play moves that are not allowed. If the human player makes the same move the game will not allow it.
Thanks for making a very cool, free, open source Go game. Real-time area control is very cool :D.
We’re a first time GO player but we’re pretty strategically minded. This AI is amazing! Need to play against family and friends to get good :)
The difficulty is nice but we can’t play if we’re not by our charger cause it drains our battery.
We’re a GO beginner so we were looking for a simple game to learn how to play. So we can’t speak to how well the computer algorithms match up to advanced players. But we can say that after a week we’ve removed the game because figuring out how to pass, score, start new games, replay plays, etc is difficult and, once it’s figured out, not very convenient.
The AI in this game, despite having a weak setting, if far too strong for a beginner. Despite us being able to play solid games with others, the AI will always beat us despite our efforts. A disheartening app that does nothing to encourage others to explore this deep and simple game. The interface is somewhat confusing, but rarely crashes and is responsive. The sound of putting your piece down is startling in the silence of it all and makes us dread putting a piece down. However, the accuracy and responsiveness f the actual placement and its non-existent price tag make this great if you have a human pal who wants to play.
The AI just resigns on high handicaps, and crushes us on low. How am we supposed to learn like this?
So awesome. Thanks go doing this.