Pocket Golf, rebuilt from the ground up.
Same club-and-dice golf, playing on a redrawn course with a new way to aim and swing — now with five playing buddies, live head to head against a friend, a Handicap Index of your own, and a hole you can share with someone before they've even installed the game.
A course that doesn't look like a grid anymore
Terrain now flows as merged, organic shapes with boundaries that wander instead of marching in straight lines — and neighbouring surfaces meet without a seam.
Water animates, fairways show mown stripes, and trees sway in the wind. Catch a bunker and sand kicks up; find the water and it splashes. The ball casts a shadow that tracks its height in flight, and the camera keeps the ball and the cup in frame together — opening on the whole hole, closing in as the gap does, and pulling right down onto the green for your putt.
A new way to set up the shot
The controls were rebuilt alongside the board — fewer taps to get to the swing, and more room to look around a hole before you commit to a line.
A shot with more for you to decide
Clubs no longer hand you a fixed, dice-picked distance. Every shot is a small negotiation between how far you want to hit it and how cleanly you can strike it.
Trees are no longer just a wall, either — call for a draw or a fade, pay a little accuracy for it, and curve the ball back to the target from behind the gap you aimed at.
Windy Hills
The first course built for the new engine: nine holes, every one of them played in wind, over real hills, onto greens that break.
The wind belongs to the hole, not to your attempt at it — the same every time, for everyone — so it is something to learn rather than survive: down the hole it lengthens a shot, into your face it shortens one, and across it pushes the ball wide. The hills are lit so you can read them from the tee, a climb shortens your range and a drop runs the ball on, and each hole has two or three pin positions, so the cup isn't always where it was last round.
Hole of the Day, without installing anything
One hole, the same for every player, changing at midnight. The leaderboard now runs on points rather than your single best round ever: two for a day under par, one for level, nothing for over, added up across every daily you've ever played. A bad day costs you nothing — the board ends up measuring how often you turn up, not one lucky attempt from months back.
Tap a pocketgolf.app/daily link on an iPhone that doesn't have Pocket Golf, and an App Clip drops you straight onto the tee — the real game, same shot engine, same board, same dice, not a demo of it. Finish the round and it offers you the full game next.
Challenge a friend now sends an actual link instead of a score as text, and it opens the right thing for whoever taps it — app, App Clip, or the website.
A second golfer on the course
Golf is better with company — and with somebody to beat. Pick a playing buddy from the menu, then a course, and they play the round beside you with their own ball and their own card.
Five of them, each described by one number: a Handicap Index, from Ada the club champion at 1.8 to Bea, who took the game up this spring, at 30.5. That number is the whole of what the card promises — a lower one plays better, on every course. Every buddy reads the same board you do, wind and hill included; the handicap decides how well the plan is played.
The first card on that screen is a person
Play a real opponent live, stroke for stroke, on the same two-ball a buddy round uses. Your ball is white and theirs is yellow, you take turns exactly as the rules say, and every shot they play flies across your board as they played it. The scorecard keeps both cards and says who's ahead.
The distance circle is off for both of you in a match, whatever either has it set to — two people playing the same course stroke for stroke have to be looking at the same board.
Game Center finds you another player, then draws a course the two of you both own — one that shipped with the game, never an import — and puts you both on the tee.
Pick a course, choose who to call or message if you aren't on a call yet, and their phone goes straight to the tee — every match after the first without so much as a tap.
A number of your own, above the roster
The buddy screen opens on you: your own Handicap Index, worked out the way the World Handicap System works one out. Every round becomes strokes over par scaled to eighteen holes, and the index is the average of the best few of your last twenty. It sits in your record too, and until three rounds count, both places say how many more you need.
Only real rounds count — a round played with the distance circle on is practice, and says nothing about how you judge a shot. Because nothing here carries a Course Rating or a Slope, the number is measured straight against par, so it can go below zero; it is shown that way, a signed number where lower is better.
Your golf, actually tracked
The game used to remember what you scored and nothing about how you played. Now it keeps a proper record: fairways hit, greens in regulation, putts per hole and per green, sand saves, your average strike, longest shot, and the clubs you actually reach for.
A career rank comes with it — seven rungs, Rookie to Legend, earned from holes finished and played well. Nothing to unlock: every club and course has been open since your first stroke.
The smaller things that add up
Scores, eclectics and settings follow you across iPhone, iPad and Mac. Drop a .pocketgolf file into iCloud Drive and it shows up everywhere.
Every menu, readout, scorecard and rules page — not just the buttons — in all four languages.
The course picker sorts into shelves — New, V1 and Custom — so the course you just imported is the one on top.
Your best-ever score on every hole, plus a share card that matches the in-app scorecard.
Same game. Playing better than it ever has.
Every club still carries exactly what it used to. Your achievements and leaderboards are exactly where you left them — on a course that finally looks and plays the part.