Boardalo
42 classic board and card games from around the world, one pay-once app, and a cast of illustrated rivals to beat.
View on the App Store Download all assets (zip)
The short version
I'm Chris Hardy, and Boardalo is my one-person project from Manchester, UK. It began as a chess app and grew into something closer to a playable museum: chess, backgammon and Go alongside games most apps never touch, like Senet from ancient Egypt, the Royal Game of Ur, Viking Hnefatafl, Oware from West Africa and Korea's Yut Nori. Every game has an interactive lesson, so you can learn a 4,500-year-old game in the same evening you first hear of it.
Instead of difficulty sliders, you play against illustrated characters with their own personalities and voices. You start against Digby, a cosy mole who apologises when he wins, and climb a ladder that ends with a secret boss.
The business model is deliberately old-fashioned: free download, ten games free forever (including the rare museum games), and a single small unlock for everything else. No ads, no subscriptions, no tracking of any kind.
Quick facts
| Name | Boardalo: Chess & Board Games |
| Platform | iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV, plus Tic-Tac-Toe and Drop Four in iMessage |
| Games | 42: 37 board games and 5 card games (Cribbage, Gin Rummy, Crazy Eights, Go Fish and German Whist), each with an interactive learn-by-playing lesson. Solitaire includes Klondike, Spider, Pyramid and FreeCell |
| Price | Free download, 10 games free forever, one-time £4.99 unlock for the other 32. No ads, no subscriptions, no tracking |
| Free games | Chess, Tic-Tac-Toe, Drop Four, Senet, Royal Game of Ur, Hnefatafl, Oware, Yut Nori, Tavla, Carrom |
| Languages | English plus 16 other languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Korean and Chinese |
| Accessibility | VoiceOver and Dynamic Type support, colour-blind piece markers, a high-contrast board theme, and Reduce Motion honoured. Happy to be specific about any board |
| Latest version | 26.1 (October 2026). Recent updates: five card games played against the cast, FreeCell, Spider and Pyramid Solitaire with a new deck and card backs, live games on a video call, a chess game review that grades every move, ready for the foldable iPhone, Voice Control throughout, and Apple TV support |
| Developer | Chris Hardy (Chardie), Manchester, UK. Solo project |
| App Store | apps.apple.com/app/id6768061103 |
| Contact | contact@chardie.co.uk (promo codes gladly supplied) |
Meet the opponents
Every AI opponent is a character with a personality, a voice, moods that shift with the game, and a grudge memory. They are the app's difficulty settings, wearing better outfits.
Digby
Digby will be the first to tell you he's not very good at this. He plays it safe, misses the obvious, and loses far more than he wins, and he's completely fine with that. Beating him is easy. Cheering him up when he actually wins is the hard part.
Bodge
Bodge is convinced he's a genius. He is not. He'll take credit for pure luck and demand a rematch the second he loses. Still, about once a game he pulls off something that genuinely works, and you will never hear the end of it.
Lord Grimalkin
Grimalkin thinks he's a little too good for all this, and he's usually right. He'll compliment your best move on his way to taking it apart, and he's never once looked worried.
Master Yuzu
Yuzu has played more games than he can count and lost almost none of them. He'll tell you when you've played well. He just won't let it change the result. Beat him, and you've done something very few people have.
The Great Moltini
No one knows where Moltini came from. He simply arrived, took a bow, and announced he was the greatest. He only appears once you've beaten Yuzu, because a legend needs a worthy stage.
Screenshots
Full-resolution screenshots, character art and the icon are in the asset zip.
Story angles
- A solo developer's answer to the ad-riddled board game app: pay once, own it, never be tracked.
- The playable museum: Senet, the Royal Game of Ur and Hnefatafl are thousands of years old, and almost nobody alive knows the rules. The interactive lessons change that in ten minutes.
- Difficulty settings with faces: why Boardalo replaced the Easy/Medium/Hard slider with a mole, a gremlin, a cat, a sage and a secret walrus.
- 17 languages from a team of one: how a solo project localised deeper than most studios bother to.
- The last word: every character has a closing line written for that specific game and that specific result, so losing to the cat at chess reads differently from losing to the walrus at draughts. Roughly 900 lines, all written by hand.
A note on how the art and voices were made, because it always comes up: the character illustrations and the voice clips were produced with AI tools. The characters themselves, their personalities and every line they say are mine. Happy to talk about that on the record.
Contact
Chris Hardy, contact@chardie.co.uk. Happy to answer questions, share promo codes, or provide any asset in any size.