Ninehole: 9 Card Golf

Nine cards. Nine holes. Lowest score wins. Ninehole is nine-card golf — the game you have played at a kitchen table with a borrowed deck and a scrap of paper for the scores — dealt, scored and remembered for you.

Everyone gets nine cards, face down in a 3x3 grid. On your turn you draw the top of the deck or take the top of the discard, then swap it into your grid face up, or throw it away and turn one of your own cards over. Take the discard and you must swap it in; there is no throwing it back. Nobody sees a face-down card. Not even the person it belongs to.

WHAT THE CARDS COST
Number cards are worth their face value. Ace 1. Jack 15. King 0. Joker -2. A queen is 25, and the table gasps when one turns up. Three of a kind down a column scores zero, which is the only way to make a bad card good — and the host can let rows cancel as well.

GOING OUT
The first player to turn all nine cards face up goes out, and everyone else gets exactly one more turn. Go out with anything but the lowest score — ties count as lowest — and you add a flat 50. That is the whole game in one decision: go early and risk the 50, or wait and watch somebody else end the hole while your queen is still face down.

A TABLE OF 2 TO 16
• On your own against bots: the whole game runs on your device, and no internet connection is needed.
• On the same Wi-Fi: one device opens the table and the others find it by themselves, or join by the host's address.
• Over the internet: the host reads out a six-character code and friends anywhere type it in. Room discovery and the packets between players go through Epic Online Services; the host's own device still deals every card and decides every turn.
• Bots: the host adds as many as the table has room for, and a bot also covers a seat that drops out until its player comes back.

The shoe grows with the table — a deck for every three seats, jokers in — so sixteen people get a real game rather than a thin one.

THE HOST SETS THE TABLE
Holes: 1, 3, 6, 9 or 18. Flip two cards to start: on or off. Rows cancel: on or off. Knocker penalty: on or off. Turn timer: off, 15, 30 or 60 seconds.

ONE PRICE, AND THAT IS ALL
No ads. No in-app purchases. No account to make. No analytics, no tracking, and no server of ours. The cards at a solo or same-Wi-Fi table never leave the building. An online table hands its packets to Epic Online Services and nothing else, signed in anonymously per device — there is nothing for you to create and nothing to remember. While an online table is open, Epic holds a listing for it: the table's name, the host's chosen display name, and how many of the seats are taken.

YOUR RECORD FOLLOWS YOU
Your lifetime record — holes played, best hole, lines cleared, how often you went out and how often it cost you 50 — is kept on the device and, when backup is on, in Android's own backup to your Google account, with your name, avatar and settings, so a reinstall or a new phone can bring it back. We cannot read it, and Settings can wipe it.

Cross-platform save is optional and off until you choose it. Sign in with Google and your lifetime stats are kept with Epic Online Services, so they follow you to Ninehole on iPhone and iPad as well. Signing out keeps the save for next time; Settings can delete it.

MADE TO BE READ ACROSS A ROOM
Choose classic card faces with pips, or one big number per card. Put the running value on every face-up card, or leave it off. Reduce Motion is honoured everywhere: the cards stop flying and the felt holds still, and nothing about the rules changes. Sound and haptics each have their own switch.

Every card, the felt, the icon and every sound in the game is drawn or synthesised in code by the studio; the two typefaces are open-licensed and credited in the app.

Ninehole plays on a phone, on a tablet and on a Mac.