Asked & answered

A golf game drawn in pencil. Each hole is a hand-drawn page: you throw a die for distance, aim along eight lines, read the wind off a printed card, and play one card from your hand to bend the rules for that hole. Eighteen holes make a round; a round takes about as long as a coffee.

It's out. Pocket Links is free on the App Store, for iPhone running iOS 17 or later. There is no iPad version.

No. Pocket Links is an independent game with rules written from scratch for it — its own wind, its own cards, its own par. It shares a spirit with pen-and-paper golf the way all golf games share golf, and it is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a companion to any other product.

They're not random on the day — they're identical. Every player on today's card gets the same course, the same dice sequence, the same hand of cards and the same winds, all derived from the day's seed. The only difference between two scores is the choices behind them, which is exactly what a leaderboard should measure. Courses are generated ahead of time and vetted before they ship.

A deck of eight for each round. You hold three, spend exactly one on every hole, and draw back to three; spent cards return when the deck comes around, roughly twice in eighteen holes. Cards bend one rule each — steady the dice, befriend the rough, stop dead at the cup — and all twenty in the catalogue are balance-tested to sit within a stroke and a half of each other. In ranked play everyone is dealt the same cards; in casual you build your own eight.

No ads, no energy bars, nothing to sign up for. There is one optional purchase — the Member’s Card, paid once, no subscription — which opens the weekend tournaments, the full archive of past dailies, and the stationery drawer. Today’s round and its leaderboard are free for everybody and always will be. Game Center and Sign in with Apple are optional and only power leaderboards.

Fully. Courses are generated on the device, rounds are saved on the device, and nothing about play needs a connection. Leaderboard scores post whenever you're next online.

As close to nothing as an app can do. Your rounds live in one file on your device; there are no analytics, no tracking, and no third-party services. The whole story is on the privacy page, and it's short.

Because that's the game. The wind card gives you the strength and the bearing; laying it against your aim is yours to do, like laying a pencil against the page. The wind shifts between strokes, so the sum is never done for long — and a ball misread into the water costs a stroke, like it should.

One person, with a long-standing fondness for golf games and paper. Say hello: askigloodigital@gmail.com.