Special Interest
StrategyForge
Master chess, Go, checkers, backgammon, mancala, and Connect 4 through AI-coached lessons, puzzle challenges, and online play — with a unified strategy thinking curriculum for ages 9-14. The only app that teaches strategic thinking as a transferable skill across multiple classical games.
Meet your mentor
Every Spark & Anvil app has a friendly mentor character that demonstrates, praises, 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.
#FFA726 StrategyForge is a strategy games academy where you learn to play chess, Go, checkers, backgammon, mancala, and Connect 4 with the help of an AI coach. Solve puzzles, take lessons, and discover that the thinking skills you learn in one game help you in all the others -- and in real life too!
Distributed-narrative cast
Meet the cast
StrategyForge's 5-character cast embodies the transferable strategic-thinking primitives that cross all 6 classical games (chess + Go + checkers + backgammon + mancala + Connect 4) — forward planning + multi-move look-ahead (Foresee), piece-value reasoning + exchange evaluation (Trade), pattern recognition + position-reading (Read), patience + tempo discipline (Bide), graceful loss + post-game analysis (Concede). Gambit (mentor preserved on site; code-side reconciliation Phase A: math-mentor domain-text corrected to strategy-games + transferable-thinking coach) frames each primitive. Cross-game complement to the per-game DN cluster (GambitTales / StoneSong / GeneralsTale / MotifLab / PipQuest / DealTales go DEEP per-game; StrategyForge goes CROSS-game on transferable primitives). GAMBLING-ADJACENCY GATE ENFORCED (CRITICAL — inherits ChanceForge Wave 4 + TableForge Wave 26 verbatim): Trade = exchange-evaluation NEVER wager-evaluation; Bide = strategic-positioning NEVER expected-value-betting; cast NEVER uses casino register; backgammon framed as dice-as-design-tool. Cultural-credit appendix Lesson 7 (Persia/India/China/Korea/Japan/Africa/Mesopotamia/modern-US game-origins named without mascotizing).
Foresee
Forward planning + multi-move look-ahead — three moves ahead is enough; look further only when the position asks
Trade
Piece-value reasoning + exchange evaluation — equal value isn't equal worth; position-value matters more than piece-value
Read
Pattern recognition + position-reading — patterns repeat; the shape tells you the move
Bide
Patience + tempo discipline — slow is a move too; sometimes the best move is to wait
Concede
Graceful loss + post-game analysis — losing is a teacher; winning is too; I write down both
What's inside
Game Lessons
Each game has step-by-step lessons that teach you the rules, basic strategies, and advanced tactics. Your AI coach explains every move and why it matters.
Puzzle Challenges
Test your thinking with puzzles for each game. Find the best move, plan ahead, and solve tricky positions. Puzzles get harder as you improve.
Practice Matches
Play against the AI at different difficulty levels. Start easy and work your way up. The AI coach gives you hints and explains what went wrong after each game.
Strategy Transfer
Discover how the strategies you learn in one game work in others. Planning ahead in chess helps you in Go. Controlling the board in checkers helps you in Connec
Mentored by Gambit — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How StrategyForge handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ No ads, no in-app purchases — you pay once
- ✅ COPPA compliant under the 2026 FTC amendments
- ✅ Parental controls + session limits + content filters built in
StrategyForge 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
StrategyForge 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