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Aug 4, 2026
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New Pente app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac: free public beta, 100 seats
Posted:
Sep 7, 2026, 3:59 PM
Hi all. I've spent the past months building a Pente app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and the public beta is now open. It's called Lapilli Stones because Pente is Hasbro's registered trademark, but the game inside is the one this community plays: 19x19 board, five in a row or five captured pairs, with full credit on the site to Gary Gabrel and to Rollie Tesh for Keryo.
What's in it:
Standard, Keryo (captures extend to triplets, threshold rises to 15 stones), and the Tournament opening rule, in both forms. Four AI tiers, each measurably stronger than the one below. The top one thinks about four seconds a move. I would genuinely like to know how it holds up against players from here. Correspondence play over Game Center, one to fourteen days per move, as many games at once as you like. Every finished game is recorded automatically. You can walk back through any of them move by move with the engine's reading of each position, in the game's own vocabulary (trias, tesserae, captures), and ask the strongest AI what it would have played anywhere. A free-setup practice board, a chart of the mistakes you repeat across games, and a 160-page companion book of rules and strategy built in. One-time purchase at launch, no ads, no subscriptions, no tracking. The beta is free.
The website has screenshots, an illustrated manual, and a writeup of how the AI opponents were built and measured: https://lapilli-stones.com
The beta is capped at 100 testers, first come, first served.
What I most want from this group is strong players beating on the top tier and telling me where it plays badly, and opinions on the hint explanations, which try to teach rather than just point. Feedback here or through TestFlight both work. Thanks.
