Couch Classics — seven board games for the sofa

Couch Classics began as a wish for a board game collection that is simple and good-looking, made for playing across a sofa with a friend — and without the glamour that games this old have never needed. The app opens on a table with the games laid out on it. Tap one and its lid opens: what the game is, where it came from, how it is varied, and the two ways to start it.

Several of these classics were strangers to us as well, so every game carries a short history. Games that have lasted this long have earned a proper introduction — and it turns out to be the fastest way to learn one you have never played.

Each entry is the real game rather than a loose interpretation of it, and several of them carry more than one board — the variant is a choice you make on the way in, not a separate tile.

Chess

Six kinds of piece, each moving its own way, and one of them worth the whole game.

Checkers

Diagonal moves and forced jumps, with a crown for every man that reaches the far side.

Backgammon

The oldest race there is: fifteen checkers home before your opponent’s. Nackgammon included.

Gomoku

Five in a row with black and white stones on a 15 × 15 board. The rules fit in a sentence.

Nine Men’s Morris

Build a mill of three and take an enemy man for each one you close. Twelve-man board included.

Mancala

Sow the seeds one to a pit and bank whatever reaches your store. Three, four or five seeds a house.

Tic-Tac-Toe

The duel everyone learns first — and, in its advanced settings, the unbounded five-in-a-row it grew out of.

What was worth spending on is not decoration but movement and light: pieces slide, settle and are taken back the way they would on a real table, so a game feels like something you are handling rather than something you are operating.

• Pass-and-play on one device. Two players share the same iPhone or iPad, which is what the whole collection was built around.
• A computer opponent in every game, at Easy, Normal or Hard. The three levels mean the same thing across the shelf, so what you learned in one game carries to the next.
• Named players. Add the people who actually play, and the collection remembers them between games.
• Results that are worth keeping. Statistics are kept per player and per game, and split by the kind of opponent faced — beating Hard and beating a friend are not the same achievement, so they are never added together.
• Variants on the way in. The twelve-man morris board, Nackgammon, the number of seeds in a mancala house and the size of a tic-tac-toe board are all chosen before play, not hidden in a settings screen.

The system accessibility settings are supported throughout, and they are part of what version 1.0 stands behind. VoiceOver is a different matter, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than burying it.

• Dynamic Type throughout, and the numbers that matter are never shrunk to fit.
• Reduce Motion is honoured for every slide, settle and capture.
• Increase Contrast, Differentiate Without Color and Reduce Transparency are honoured too. Winning lines and last-move markers are two-tone shapes measured against WCAG 2.2 contrast, not a colour you have to be able to tell apart.

The work is in the app: with VoiceOver running, moves are spoken in all seven games, including the move the person beside you just played on this same device. What it has not had yet is enough testing with the people who actually depend on it — so version 1.0 does not claim VoiceOver support, and the App Store listing will not claim it either. We would rather make it official in a later update, once it has been properly tested, than promise it now and be wrong.

• Most boards can already be read and played space by space — Checkers, Nine Men’s Morris, Mancala and Chess, and every bounded board in Tic-Tac-Toe and Gomoku.
• Backgammon is read as a whole position rather than point by point, and its moves are played by touch. Point-by-point reading is planned for a later version.
• If you rely on VoiceOver, please write to us. There is no analytics telling us what does not work; you telling us is how we find out, and it is what will get this to a promise we can make.

Couch Classics collects nothing. There is no account to make and no server of ours to send anything to. Your games, your players and their results are written on your device and stay there.

• App Privacy label: “Data Not Collected.” Meant literally.
• No adverts — nothing interrupts a turn, and nothing is sold to anyone.
• No analytics, no advertising identifiers, no crash-reporting SDKs, no third-party code at all.
• No tracking prompt (ATT), because nothing is tracked.
• One thing is kept off the device — which game you chose for free — and it is kept in your own iCloud rather than by us, so that the gift survives deleting the app. We cannot read it.
• Purchases go through the App Store, which handles the payment and tells us nothing about who you are.

• One game of your choosing is free — any of the seven, chosen by you rather than picked for you.
• The rest are sold one at a time, as one-time purchases. Buy the one game you actually want and stop there.
• A single purchase opens the whole collection — including the games added to it in later updates.
• Never a subscription, and nothing you have unlocked is ever taken back.
• One universal app for iPhone and iPad, so a purchase covers both.

• Platform: iPhone and iPad — one universal app, laid out for each.
• Minimum version: iOS and iPadOS 17.0 or later, chosen deliberately so that the older family iPad on the coffee table is still invited.
• Permissions: none. No location, no contacts, no notifications.
• Connection: not required. Every game is played on the device.
• Status: in development, in its final stretch before the App Store.