Cornhole Rivals
A bean bag blast.
You hold the phone the way you would hold a bag and swing it underhand. It measures the arc — how fast your arm was moving at the bottom of it, where you were pointing when you started, and which way your wrist rolled as you let go — and throws on that. The bag flies, curves if you twisted, lands on the plywood, slides, and is then in the way of the next one. Up to four people throw from their own phones over the local network, or everybody throws from the same phone and passes it along. No account, no server, and nothing to download once the game is on the phone.
What happens on the lawn
The swing is the throw
Wind up, swing underhand, let go. Speed is how fast your arm was going at the bottom of the arc, direction is where the phone was pointing when you started it, and curve is the roll in your wrist on the way through. The aim freezes the moment you wind up, because after that the phone is turning with your shoulder rather than with you — and if you want it settled before then, tap once and it holds where you left it.
Or throw it with your thumb
Drag sideways to aim, back for power, and let go. It is another way in rather than an easier game: a dragged throw arrives as exactly the same throw a swing would have made, and nothing after it can tell which one you used. It is there for anyone who would rather not swing a phone across a room, and the whole game is playable that way from the first bag to the last.
A bag slaps and slides
The flight is solved rather than animated, on a fixed clock that does not care what frame rate the phone managed. A flat bag hops about three centimetres and slides. One arriving end over end hops fifteen and travels most of the deck, which is why the twist is worth learning. Bags already lying there get shoved when you hit them and stay where they are shoved, so a board fills up and gets harder as the inning goes on.
The wind is something you read
One breeze, worked out from how far into the match you are, and everything answers to the same number: the grass leans, the dust drifts, the hiss under it swells, and the bag goes where it is pushed. There is a pennant on the near lawn telling you what it is doing, on every level, because it is part of the park rather than a piece of help. The needle that reads it out in metres per second is there on all of them but Pro, where you get the cloth and your own judgement.
Help that tells you things, never does them
Four levels, from a six-metre board in still air with heavy bags to a ten-metre one in gusts. What moves between them is the board, the bags, the weather, and how much you are shown — an aim line, a dotted arc where the bag would land, the wind needle. None of it touches the throw. Turning the help off makes the game harder to read; it does not make the bag harder to land.
Four phones, or one phone
One phone hosts, puts a six-character code and a square on screen, and lets each player in by hand. It runs over the local network, so a lawn with no signal is fine. Or leave the radio off entirely and pass one phone around: that is the whole game too, not a reduced version of it, and it is the half that was built first.
- Platform
- iPhone, portrait, one hand
- Requires
- iOS 17 or later
- Price
- Free
- Players
- One to four. Singles, or doubles when there are four
- Throwing
- An underhand swing, or drag to aim and pull back for power
- Nearby play
- Over the local network, with a six-character code or a QR square
- Offline
- The whole game plays on one phone with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth switched off
- Records
- Five leaderboards, on your device, filterable by difficulty and player count
- Accessibility
- Dynamic Type everywhere, VoiceOver on every control, drag instead of swing