Igosil: New Go app for beginners by Nihon Kiin

Key features:

• ⁠Choice battle: play a game of Go with 3 options laid out for you!
• ⁠Joseki card battle: Collect joseki cards and select cards to place on the board and let the AI fight for you!

IOS App Link

Official Website

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Limited Offer 99,99 €

:face_with_monocle:

The other “limited offers” are also quite expensive :eyes:


BTW, “Unbalance Corporation” is also the company that built “Crazy Stone” and “Champion Go”, “Beginner’s Go” (and lots of other apps.

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It’s like a generic enough freemium model, I was having a look at it.

You have “energy” to spend to play against bots that regenerates, and various coin rewards for winning that you can spend on energy, or on other things like ranking up with tests etc.

The usual freemium stuff, watch ads daily to get the daily limits of free stuff, or pay to turn off ads, or get more X item etc.

It doesn’t seem as annoying as other apps that I’ve seen that either do popup ads regularly in between other levels and games, or banner ads that take up screen space. Seems more like opt in ads to get something in game.

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Deleted it right away after playing around a little with it … horrible sounds and music (yes, you can turn those off) … goofy design, too many clicks, and then they want money for doing this and doing that … yeah, sure, good luck making $$$ ¥¥¥ :roll_eyes:

Definitely no match for the fabulous SmartGo One by Anders Kierulf (of SGF fame), nor for the many other really good Go apps around.

Just realised they have Go Trivia Quiz as well!

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A live review video on Kibe Natsuki (木部夏生 a professional Go player and a consultant of the app)'s channel

For those who don’t speak Japanese, the digest for the videos, the first part is the introduction for Go rules and basic concepts, are more traditional text based explanations (if you are a true beginner probably not very helpful). And then the 5 core skills -「閃き力」(creativity skill, mostly about atari, liberties and capturing),「感覚力」(sense skill, about position judgement, weakness/thickness, fuseki idea corner>edge, urgent before large, etc.),「推理力」(reasoning skill, more traditional life-and-death, like understanding dead shape, key stones for eye space, etc.),「計算力」(calculation skill, about how to finish end-game, find unfinished borders, and yose size, etc.), and「記憶力」(memory skill, memorize and repeating fuseki, joseki, etc.), for players to practice on (sort of like Legend of Baduk’s different levels, but categorized by types and than difficulty level, instead of ladder like difficulties first, and types within). And the final part is about their joseki card battle system, and a bit of the AI analysis function.

Obviously, the most “innovative” part of the app is the joseki card system, although you need to envision that the AI taking over to finish the board with the four joseki corners is very “straightforward”, like it would mostly just extend, hane \and run until running into a friendly stone, and not guarantee knowing the direction it is going (like some of the joseki card might be setup to fail, where it doesn’t understand semiai fight and kill itself)

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