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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.
Re: New Pente app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac: free public beta, 100 seats
Posted:
Sep 8, 2026, 4:03 PM
Not having Apple products, I can't be a beta tester, but I can give you a bit of feedback from looking at the manual. As someone who is mildly colorblind, the yellow green boundary is sometumes blurry. For example, on the board which says "The Artisan would play J10. This wins the game outright." the yellow stone at L10 is virtually indistinguishable in color to the green L11 stone to my eye. Other boards aren't as bad for me with those two color choices, but I initially thought that L10 was green.
Retired from rated TB Pente, but still playing live and TB variants
Posts:
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67 Home page
Re: New Pente app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac: free public beta, 100 seats
Posted:
Sep 8, 2026, 5:07 PM
@watsu
Thank you very much for this! Please take a look again and see if the fix I put in helps any.
The game has white and black stones as an option, but in the manual changing the screenshots would mean more broad ranging changes to find replace colors in text and so forth. So instead I turned on the High Contrast stones (each color is ringed by a white or black circle) and increased the size of the screenshots.
Hopefully this makes the whole thing clearer and easier to understand. If it does not please let me know.
Re: New Pente app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac: free public beta, 100 seats
Posted:
Sep 8, 2026, 5:18 PM
"Hopefully this makes the whole thing clearer and easier to understand." Yes, it's much clearer now. The white dotted circle might get confused for the solid white circle if one doesn't know which color is playing, but the circles definitely help distinguish the two sides.
Retired from rated TB Pente, but still playing live and TB variants
Posts:
13
Registered:
Aug 4, 2026
Age:
67 Home page
Re: New Pente app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac: free public beta, 100 seats
Posted:
Sep 8, 2026, 8:51 PM
@watsu, In reference to the dashed circle being hard to tell from the white circle, I changed the way that is laid out in the game, from a dashed circle to a square marking the point where the hint is referencing. Hopefully this makes it so there can be no confusion. That change will be in the next build to the beta testers.
I really appreciate your help making the game better.
