IGO Academy

Learn Go from scratch, sharpen your reading with 500+ puzzles, and take on five levels of AI — or play friends over Game Center and your local network. Free, no ads.

IGO Academy is a complete way to learn and play Go — the ancient board game also known as Baduk (바둑) and Weiqi (围棋). Whether you have never placed a stone or you are sharpening your reading, everything is here, offline, with no ads and no accounts required.

LEARN FROM ZERO • Eight interactive lessons take you from the very first stone to scoring a finished game: liberties and capture, atari, saving stones, illegal moves, the ko rule, life and two eyes, and territory. • Every lesson step is hands-on — you play the move yourself.

500+ PROBLEMS TO SHARPEN YOUR READING • More than 100 problems at each of five difficulty tiers: Novice, Easy, Normal, Hard, and Expert. • Capture, atari, escape, connection, and life-and-death (tsumego) — including snapbacks and vital-point shapes. • Your progress is tracked so you always know what is left.

FIVE LEVELS OF AI • Play full games against opponents from gentle beginner to a Monte-Carlo Tree Search engine that actually reads ahead. • Choose your color, add handicap stones, and play on 5×5, 7×7, 9×9, 13×13, 19×19, or 21×21 boards.

PLAY PEOPLE • Game Center for online matches. • Local-network play over your Wi-Fi or wired network using Bonjour — no internet or account needed.

BUILT RIGHT • Full rules: captures, suicide, simple ko and positional superko, two-pass scoring (Chinese area or Japanese territory) with komi, and unlimited undo. • Export any game as an SGF file to study or share. • Clean, native, and fast.

IGO Academy is free. Sit down at the board and play.