A watercolor puzzle of Go, spirits, and the five phases.
One stone, one verb, one journey through an ink-painted East Asia.
A single-player roguelike puzzle game where every colored stone in your pouch is a different verb — cast on a hand-painted East Asian archipelago, with an AlphaGo-trained AI quietly making sure every level is solvable, surprising, and earned.
The world's oldest strategy game is also its most patient. Islands of Mist keeps Go's contemplative core — place a stone, breathe, read the board — and adds something the centuries didn't: a tiny, scarce pouch of colored stones, each one a different verb. A vermilion stone detonates in the four directions. An azure stone draws a dragon's line along its row, breathing life into your group. A corpse-grey jiangshi hops forward, one intersection per turn, until it strikes whatever stands in front of it.
You travel an archipelago painted in watercolor and ink, solving the Mist that hides each region. You meet sages at springs and traders at fords. You decide which stones to spend now and which to carry forward. You learn the five phases — wood, fire, earth, metal, water — not by reading them, but by watching them eat each other on the board.
Every puzzle in Islands of Mist is validated by a neural-network policy agent inspired by AlphaGo. If the agent can't find an elegant solution within your pouch budget, the level doesn't ship. The result is a game that respects your time the way Go respects your attention.
“We started with one question: what if every colored stone in your pouch was a different verb? Once we asked it, the rest of the game built itself out of Chinese watercolor, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and roughly thirty minutes of conversation under a Bay Area night sky.” — Erik Bethke, Designer
The game launches on iOS, Android, and the web. The campaign holds roughly thirty hours of curated puzzles; the daily Mist gives players one fresh procedural board each morning; the practice mode is free play with whatever pouch you can imagine.
Premium · No timers · No loot boxes · No paid stones · Available wherever quiet games are sold.
Vermilion Bird 朱雀
Ordnance · cardinal blast
Place it — and it falls. The Vermilion Bird does not stay. On placement, fire descends in the four cardinal directions, three intersections each way, and that ground is gone for the rest of the level. Twelve points of board, vaporized in a single watercolor splash.
If the blast crosses a White Tiger (metal), the fire consumes it and the arm continues another intersection. Fire melts metal — the cosmology is a rules engine, not a coat of paint.
Azure Dragon 青龍
East-west influence
A dragon connects. On placement, the Azure Dragon does not strike. It draws a dragon-line of influence along its row, all the way to the nearest friendly stone — or the eastern or western edge of the board. Stones along that line breathe an extra liberty while the Dragon lives.
The line is the dragon's body. Capture the dragon, and the breath stops. Until then, your group is harder to kill, your aji is alive, and the opponent must spend a stone to break the row.
Jiangshi 僵屍
Auto-hop · between turns
A corpse hops, it does not walk. On placement, you choose the direction the jiangshi faces. Then on every turn that follows — before you act — the jiangshi hops one intersection forward. Always one. Always forward. Until it strikes the first thing it meets.
If the next intersection holds an enemy, the jiangshi captures it and stops, talisman fluttering. If a friend stands there, the jiangshi politely halts — etiquette of the dead. If the next intersection is the void Vermilion left behind, the corpse hops in and is gone.
Sixteen stones for the first journey. Black and white are the ground. The Four Symbols ride the cardinal directions. The folklore creatures break the rules in their own ways. Hover over any tile.
A miniature board for each verb in the pouch. Read left to right: setup, the move, the consequence.
Standard Go · capture
The ground verb. A stone with no liberties is captured. Everything else is built on this.
South · fire · cardinal blast
Place and it falls. Three intersections each cardinal arm, vaporized.
East · wood · influence
A dragon-line of breath along its row. Friendly stones in the line gain a liberty while the dragon lives.
North · water · defender
+2 liberties to adjacent friends. Adjacent water quenches an approaching Vermilion arm one intersection short.
Center · earth · +1 liberty
The axis around which the realm turns. Every orthogonal friend breathes one liberty more.
East-west capture · range 2 · Wu
A thrust along the row, through a continuous line of enemies. The spear does not turn aside.
N-S capture · scales across the run
A column-thrust whose range grows with each kill. Carry it forward; it remembers.
Aji · chambered slide
Placed once, slides later. The threat is not its position; the threat is where it will be.
Auto-hop · between turns
One intersection forward every turn, until it strikes. Friends it respects; enemies it captures.
Chain · fuse
Dormant alone. Lit by an adjacent fire. The chain is the payoff — pre-plant well.
Sacrifice · on capture
You want this one captured. When it dies, every open liberty becomes a fuse, and fire leaves the body.
Refund · reposition
A regret repaid. Remove one of your stones; the type returns to the pouch, fresh.
Once per level · rewind
A pearl ripple over the board. One placement returns, as if it never happened.
Life & death · phantom eye
A second eye that almost is. The group reads as living, even though the eye is a dream.
Wuxing · harmonize
Partial cycles grant breath. Full cycle, all five elements adjacent, transmutes nearby enemies.
Mutual quench · water/fire
Place near fire and both vanish. A bowl of water spills, a flame goes out.
Wager-swap · atari only
A wrestling match with a spirit. If the target is already in atari, you swap places. If not, your stone is the cost.
Arc denial · Wei
An inked arc traced between two intersections. Enemy stones cannot cross the crane's path while the ink is wet.
Every added rule is a flaw. The colored stones earn their complexity by deepening the reading, not replacing it.
The pouch is scarce. The pouch is the spine. Every level is a question about what you carried.
You commit when you commit. The board waits. The Mist will still be there in the morning.