GoQuest

For 9x9 games on the go, GoQuest is the best app! I never have to wait long for a match and there is a wide variety of player strength.

I’ve had this after all of 15 minutes and I can’t believe how many different things I found wrong with it. First of all, it matched me up against a player who is 25K better than me, which is just a waste of my time, there are plenty of other places I can play if I want to get smashed flat by a far superior player. I tried to file a report about it, and the report screen is totally broken… It lets you include about a sentence and a half before it complains that the details are too long, and then, it kept just erasing the details before I can submit them, it’s totally buggy. it doesn’t explain why you win or lose things, and the tsumego problems I can’t even figure out how to do, there’s no instructions or controls, and it occasionally flashes things at you in Japanese only, which I don’t speak. Update:I continued playing this in the hopes it would get better, and only found more bugs and problems. First of all, it frequently puts down a piece next to where you tried to put the piece down, often cost you the game. Yes you can turn on double tap… This doesn’t help the problem, it happens the same once you learn to habitually double tap as it did when you were single tapping. They also say it’s “beginner friendly“ but then they make you play not just against an opponent, but against the clock: if you don’t play expert level and know how to divide your attention to both watch the clock and think through the game at the same time, and not just win but win quickly, you will often lose by running out of time, which is nothing but frustrating since it has nothing to do with how well you play and certainly gets in the way of learning how to play well. Also until you figure out how to turn the bots off, which is hidden in the unexplained settings, you’ll wind up often playing bots which are weird and idiosyncratic players and will teach you terrible habits that will cost you when you start playing humans. And the problem where it keeps matching you up with players who are much, much, MUCH better than you never goes away. also, they have a TON, I mean a LOT, of really great players who don’t play very often so they’re ranked very low, and as you proceed through the ranks, you get penalized more if you lose to a low ranked player, so as soon as you begin to get ahead, they match you with an expert player who is said to be “25K” or “30K”, but they are incredibly strong and will smash you flat in no time, and you will lose maximum ranking points for losing to this supposed “low ranked” player, because their ranking system is inaccurate and lets extremely advanced players remain at much too low ranks. And no matter who you’re playing, wind only give you a few points, but each loss costs you many points, so if you are trying to advance in rank you will not proceed, you will struggle a very long time to get ahead and then lose all that progress in just a couple of games. Plus they don’t ever allow you to know what the komi is, so you can’t tell if you’re winning, or strategize to deploy your pieces effectively if you’re just trying to win. And some games end in a “draw” or “tko”, neither pf which exists in Go! They just made them up for this app for some reason. They’re against the rules. It’s all incredibly frustrating, weird, annoying, and, put it all together, I would recommend beginners stay far, far, far away from this app. I found it an incredibly frustrating experience and it’s making me hate the game of go.