Every screen, and what it does
The game teaches its own rules — the in-app tutorial walks through all of them with stones moving on a demo board, and the companion book under Help goes as deep as anyone could want. This page is the reference for everything else: the buttons, the settings, and the study tools, with pictures. It reads top to bottom, but every section stands alone.
A note on the pictures: every screenshot in this manual has High Contrast Stones turned on (Settings, Board). It rings every yellow stone in black and every green stone in white, so the two sides stay distinct even without color vision. If yellow and green ever look alike to you on the board, that switch is yours — or choose the slate-and-shell stones under Boards and Stones and play in black and white.
Each player has a card showing their captures out of the five pairs that win, and a small badge marks whose turn it is. Tap any intersection to place a stone. The row of buttons under the board (beside it, on a bigger screen):
Settings is four tabs — Game, Study, Board, and Sound — so nothing hides down a long scroll. The Game tab holds the opponent: pass-and-play with a Human beside you, the AI, or an Online match through Game Center. Against the AI you choose which color it plays and which rung of the workshop ladder you face — Novice, Apprentice, Journeyman, or Artisan, each described in a line under its name. The Opponents page tells you who they are.
Below that, the rules: Standard, Keryo-Lapilli (triplet captures count too, first to fifteen stones), and the Tournament variants that restrict the first player's second stone. Changing opponent or rules mid-game asks before it discards the board.
The Hint button always rings a square. Turn on Explain Hints — on the Study tab of Settings — and each hint also says why, in one line of the language the companion book teaches: this wins outright, this blocks a loss, this answers an open three, this threatens a capture, or nothing is forced and this builds shape. It's off by default; the ring alone is there for players who just want a nudge. And a hint is a considered answer, not a dice roll: ask twice in the same position and you get the same square, on any device — only the opponent varies its play, so your games don't repeat.
Every game you finish is recorded automatically, from the day you installed the game — and the archive travels between your devices through your own iCloud, so a game finished on the phone appears in Your Games on the Mac. The Study section's Your Games is where they live: every finished game, newest first, with its date, length, and how it ended.
Open one and walk through it with the slider or the arrows. Under the board, every move carries a one-line reading: what it did, what it answered — and, honestly, where a threat demanded an answer that never came. Ask the Artisan and the strongest opponent thinks about the position for a few seconds and tells you what it would have played. Nothing is computed until you ask. And any recorded game exports from here — the same Export button the live game has, sharing the same .lapilli file. Any position can also jump straight to the Practice Board: Practice From Here in the toolbar hands it the position, its captures, and its side to move, ready to play out.
A free board with two bowls beside it. Tap Practice Board in the Study section and the main board itself becomes the practice board — full size, with the practice controls around it — and Back to Game returns you to your game exactly as you left it. It has two modes, and the difference is the whole idea:
The eraser removes any single stone. The note field keeps whatever you learned, and the whole board — position, note, and all — is exactly where you left it next time. The Problems menu opens any of the companion book's fifteen problems on the board; find a problem's published answer in Play mode and it's remembered with a checkmark. And Ask the Artisan works here too — on the Practice Board, the explanation always shows, because practice is where the vocabulary is learned.
The Mirror reads back through every finished game against the AI in your archive and charts the mistakes you repeat, as a rate per hundred of your own moves, oldest game to newest. The chart tells one story at a time: All shows your combined rate, or pick a single mistake type to isolate it. Each game is a faint spike; the heavy line is the running trend, averaged over recent games, and that line falling is the answer to "am I getting better?"
It counts exactly three things, and all of them are facts the record proves, never an engine's opinion:
The first two categories begin identically — an unanswered demand — and differ only in the verified consequence. No move is ever counted twice: if the opponent won immediately it is Allowed the loss, and only otherwise can it be Let a threat grow, so the worse label always wins. One honest wrinkle: if you ignored a killing threat and the opponent missed the kill, then landed it a move or two later, that files under Let a threat grow — the immediate-loss label is strict about "very next move."
A threat you ignored that the opponent never punished at all is deliberately not counted — the Mirror only claims what the record can prove, because one wrong flag would cost it your trust. Below the chart, the flagged moves are gathered into collections by type, counts in the headers, so you can study all your similar problems together; tapping a header focuses the chart on that type, and tapping any move opens the walk-back at that exact position, ring on the move, so you can judge the claim on the board yourself. The analysis runs entirely on your device and is cached, so the Mirror opens instantly after the first look.
Nineteen lines each way is a lot of board for a hand's width of glass. On iPhone and iPad, pinch to zoom into the part of the board where the fight is happening — stones become comfortably tappable — then drag with one finger to follow the action. Placing stones works the same while zoomed, and the fit button in the corner returns the whole board in one tap. Most players zoom in early and stay there. The Practice Board zooms the same way.
On your devices. Recorded games travel between your own machines through your own iCloud, the same way your win/loss tallies do; practice positions and the Mirror's analysis are files on the device that made them, read by that device. We run no servers and never see any of it. The full policy is one page: Privacy.