LG / game / BUSIDOL GOMOKU
REVIEW
Busidol Gomoku brings the five-in-a-row classic to the LG living room.
A free webOS port of the centuries-old Asian strategy board game, built around Magic Remote pointing and a single-screen player-versus-AI loop.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 2 MIN READ
Busidol Gomoku is the kind of small, self-contained board-game port that LG webOS quietly needs more of. The TV-app catalogues on every smart-TV platform tilt heavily toward streaming, and the long tail of genuinely useful non-video software — calculators, casual games, board-game ports — tends to be thin. A free, no-friction Gomoku client from a small Korean developer fills a real gap, even if the execution is closer to functional than polished.
Gomoku itself needs little introduction in its home region — the Asian-tradition five-in-a-row game has been played in some form for centuries across China, Japan, and Korea, and the rules are simple enough to teach a child in a minute. The challenge of porting it to a TV is less about the game and more about the input device. Busidol’s answer is to lean entirely on the LG Magic Remote’s pointer, which turns the 15x15 board from a navigation nightmare into something you can play comfortably from a sofa.
For LG webOS owners who already know Gomoku, this is a sensible free install. For everyone else, the question is whether a TV is the right place to learn a board game that plays just as well on paper or a phone — and the honest answer is probably not. But the option being there, free and unobtrusive, is the right outcome for a platform store.
Busidol Gomoku is the kind of small, self-contained board-game port that LG webOS quietly needs more of.
FEATURES
Busidol Gomoku is a single-screen implementation of Gomoku — the Asian-tradition five-in-a-row strategy game played on a 15x15 (sometimes 19x19) board where two players alternate placing stones and the first to align five wins. The webOS build is a free download from Busidol, a small Korean developer with several other classical board-game ports on the LG store.
Play is local: a single human against the on-device AI, with the Magic Remote pointing at intersections to drop stones. There is no online matchmaking, no account, and no in-app purchase. The interface is sparse — board, stone counter, restart — and stays out of the way of the game itself.
The AI offers difficulty levels rather than a fixed opponent, which is the right call for a casual TV port. Stronger settings play the standard Gomoku opening theory cleanly; weaker settings let beginners learn the shape of a winning diagonal without getting flattened in twelve moves.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The Magic Remote fit is the quiet win here. Gomoku's grid is exactly the kind of interface a pointer device handles well — directional-pad navigation across a 15x15 board would be miserable, and hover-and-click maps cleanly to how the game actually plays.
Free with no ads, no account, no upsell. For a casual board-game install on a TV, that's worth more than a coat of visual polish. The game loads fast, plays a complete match in five to ten minutes, and asks nothing in return.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
Presentation is functional rather than crafted. The board art is plain, sound design is minimal, and there is no move history, undo, or post-game analysis — features that strong Gomoku apps on phones treat as standard. A pass-and-play two-human mode on a single TV would also be a natural fit and is absent.
No online play means the ceiling is the on-device AI. Players who reach the top difficulty have nowhere to go. Rules clarity could also be sharper — Gomoku has several competing rulesets (freestyle, standard, Renju with opening restrictions on Black) and the app does not clearly signal which it implements.
CONCLUSION
Busidol Gomoku is a small, honest port of a classical strategy game to a platform that rarely gets them. It will not replace a dedicated Gomoku app on a phone or a face-to-face game on a real board, but as a free webOS install for a quiet evening, it does the job. Worth keeping an eye on whether Busidol adds two-player local mode or a clearer rules display in future updates.