Design the course. Then go play it.

Start with a piece of land.

Choose your setting: seaside links, sandhills, desert, parkland, tropical, mountain or city park. Start with a layout, then make it yours.

Then lay out the hole from above. Drag the fairway from tee to green, tilt the putting surface, drop a pond in front of the landing area and a bunker just past it. The panel on the side tells you how the hole plays as you go, and every hole is playable the moment you draw it, on the same ground the pros will play.

You can also just type what you want, like “a 210 yard downhill par 3 to an island green,” and the game lays it out for you to adjust. Ask for changes the same way: “move the pond closer to the tee.” It works for whole courses too.

Then open the gates.

Every bunker and pond comes out of the budget, so you learn quickly which ideas were worth the money. Once the course opens, it has to stand up to real weather.

In the desert, hot air carries the ball farther and your long par 4 starts playing short. Rain softens the fairways and slows the greens, so the same hole can feel like a different one.

Members, dues and green speed.

Set the fees, hire the staff, decide how firm the greens are and how long the rough grows. Things go wrong and you decide what to do about them. Bid for events, and when one comes to your course, the field plays it for real and the scoring averages tell you which holes worked. With Apple Intelligence on, the week’s club news gets written up as short stories about what happened.

Apple Intelligence enhances hole and course descriptions and writes club news on supported devices with iOS 26 or macOS 26 and later. It runs on your device. Without it, built-in keywords and templates still turn descriptions into holes and courses, and club news appears as plain notes.

Your shots and theirs, same physics.

You swing with a touch stick, and you can curve the ball around a tree or keep it low under the wind. The ball model is tuned against launch monitor numbers from the tour, so a good drive goes about as far as a good drive should.

Build a bag of up to fourteen from thirty clubs. Pick a blade putter for feel on pace or a mallet that keeps mishits closer to the line. Dial in your distances on the driving range, or work on chipping, bunker shots and putting in the short game area. Review your round stats and share a scorecard or a favorite hole. Your own scores never count against the club, so play as badly as you like.