Academics
GridForge
Five connection and territory games for tweens — Connect Four, Gomoku, Reversi, Hex, and Dots-and-Boxes against a graded AI, plus the shared ideas that win across all of them.
▶ Play it nowBuilt for sittings of about 20 minutes on the screen. That is our design budget, not a measurement.
Meet your mentor
Every Spark & Anvil app has a friendly mentor character that demonstrates, asks, and patiently scaffolds learning. On-device AI personalizes the mentor's responses to your kid's progress — never connecting to a server, never collecting data.
Mentored by Gridley
#2e8b6f Characters who teach
Meet the cast
Arbor
The game tree: every position branches into the moves that follow
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Ballast
Stability and corners: the unflippable pieces in Reversi
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Causeway
The bridge: a virtual connection that cannot be cut in Hex
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Domino
Forcing sequences: chaining threats to keep the initiative in Gomoku
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Flank
Territory flip: capturing a line of pieces in Reversi
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Mobi
Mobility: keeping more moves available than your opponent
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Oddwin
Parity: who-moves-last, the key to Dots-and-Boxes
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Rowan
Connection: extending a chain of your pieces toward a win
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Twain
The fork: one move that makes two threats at once
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Browse all chapters → · What's distributed-narrative methodology? →
What's inside
Learning goal
Five connection and territory games for tweens — Connect Four, Gomoku, Reversi, Hex, and Dots-and-Boxes against a graded AI, plus the shared ideas that win across all of them.
Question kits
16 curriculum-aligned question kits, 400 questions in all, mapped to recognized standards.
On-device AI mentor
FoundationModels-powered hints, feedback, and adaptive difficulty — all running locally.
Mentored by Gridley — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How GridForge handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ Free — no ads, no in-app purchases
- ✅ No personal information collected from children — in line with COPPA (updated by the 2026 FTC amendments)
- ✅ No chat with strangers — play-together rooms use a short code and preset emotes, never typed messages
For you, the grown-up
The grown-up side of GridForge on Spark & Whetstone, our free site for grown-ups: Four in a row. Drop discs together — easy at any age.
GridForge runs on ForgeKit — the open-source Swift Package Manager framework that powers every Spark & Anvil app. ForgeKit ensures consistent accessibility, COPPA compliance, and design language across the portfolio, so your kid's progress and preferences feel coherent across every app they touch.
Coming to the App Store
GridForge is in active development. Email us to hear when it ships — no marketing, no spam, just a one-shot launch announcement.
Email me at launch
