Right now, the AI opponent in GoZen is too strong for beginners.
That’s an odd thing to admit in the first post of a devlog. But it says a lot about what this app is trying to be. GoZen is a calm Go app for Android, made for people who are new to the game. If it beats them every time, it has failed them, however well it plays.
This is the first entry of a weekly diary. Each week I’ll share what changed, what was hard, and what I’m still working on.
A beginner needs an opponent they can learn from
When you’re starting Go, losing every game in the first few minutes doesn’t teach you much. You can’t even tell which move was the mistake. Most people in that situation don’t study harder, they just stop opening the app.
So, the AI in GoZen is being tuned. The goal isn’t a weaker opponent, it’s an opponent that gives you a game you can actually follow and your mistakes are visible.
It turns out that making an AI play gently in a natural way is its own puzzle. I’ll write more about it as it gets better.
Same idea in the puzzles
GoZen also has tsumego: short life-and-death puzzles, where you look for the move that saves a group of stones or captures it.
Right now, if you play a wrong move, the app tells you it’s wrong. That’s the easy part. I’m working on the harder part: showing why it’s wrong. That’s the moment where a puzzle stops being a guess and starts being a lesson.
I’m also working on short lessons that stay on the board. One idea, shown with stones, a few words, and back to playing.
What “calm” means here
Underneath all of this is one choice: the board comes first.
- No account. You can place your first stone without giving an email.
- No ads.
- No notifications chasing you.
- It works without a connection, so the board is there on a train or in a café with bad wifi.
I’d like a session with GoZen to feel like ten quiet minutes at a board, and then you put the phone down.
What’s next
More tuning on the AI, and more work on puzzle explanations.
GoZen is Android-only for now. I don’t have a team to build and test an iOS version properly yet. If that’s what you’d need, tell me: if enough people ask, I’ll make the effort.
GoZen is still pre-release. If you’d like to try it when it’s ready, you can join the Android waitlist at go-zen.app.
And a question for you, especially if you’re new to Go: when you lost a lot early on, did it help you learn, or did it make you want to stop?