At Symbolic Software, we’re thrilled to announce the release of our latest creation, Runes of Ardun, available now on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store!

Embark on a journey to the forgotten lands of Ardun, where ancient runes hold the power of animals long revered and feared. Runes of Ardun reimagines the ancient Japanese strategy game Mini Shogi, transforming it into a strategic duel of wits and cunning on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Android. Each piece, an ancient rune, represents a mighty animal spirit. Your mission is to outmaneuver your opponent and capture their Lion. There can only be one king!

About Runes of Ardun

Runes of Ardun reimagines Mini Shogi, a streamlined variant of the venerable Japanese Shogi board game (also known as Japanese chess), transforming it into a riveting duel of ancient animal spirits on your digital devices. Developing a high-performance AI for such a game posed a unique blend of challenges, requiring an innovative approach to navigate the strategic depth and vast game tree Mini Shogi is known for.

Like our previous App Store hit, Piccolo: Othello, Runes of Ardun features beautiful original graphics, a high-performance AI written in Rust, and employs the latest Apple SwiftUI technologies. It is 100% tracking free and ad free, and focuses entirely on giving the highest quality board game experience to our users.

Writing a strong, high-performance Shogi AI in Rust

Runes of Ardun not only challenges the strategic minds of board game enthusiasts but also showcases the development of high-performance, strong chess-like AIs in the Rust programming language.

In order to make Runes of Ardun work well on mobile devices, we developed our own, in-house Shogi AI, dubbed CuteShogi, written in Rust. CuteShogi uses a combination of the MTD(f) algorithm, an in-house evaluation functions with tuned weights, and, in some instances, MCTS (Monte Carlo Tree Search) in order to provide a high-performance Shogi experience that we consider competitive with Fairy-Stockfish, the current strongest Shogi AI engine.

Rust’s reputation for performance and safety isn’t just hearsay; it’s the foundation upon which our AI stands. Here’s how Rust’s features and libraries have been instrumental in our development:

1. serde for Serialization: Critical for quickly saving and loading game states, ensuring our transposition table is both fast and reliable.
2. Concurrent Hash Maps with DashMap: This library provides the necessary infrastructure for our AI to remember and learn from past games, enhancing its strategic depth.
3. Magic Bitboard Representation: A testament to Rust’s capability to handle complex data structures efficiently, allowing for rapid move generation and board evaluation.
4. Parallel Computation with rayon: By spreading the AI’s thought process across multiple CPU cores, rayon helps deepen our AI’s strategic contemplation without slowing down the game.
5. Memory and Performance Optimization: Rust’s strict ownership model ensures that our AI runs like a well-oiled machine, with minimal overhead and maximum efficiency.

Play Runes of Ardun today!

With Runes of Ardun, we’re excited to offer an experience that’s both fun and intellectually stimulating. Runes of Ardun is available today on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Mac, and on the Play Store for Android.