How to play Bulls and Cows
Bulls & Cows is a number deduction game: you guess a hidden number and every attempt comes back with two counts — how many digits are right, and how many of them sit in the right position. The round is won by reading those counts against each other, and the app puts three modes in front of that loop: single player against an AI opponent, a two-player Game Center match, and training.
Bulls & Cows asks you to work out a number you are not allowed to see. You enter a guess, the game answers with two counts — how many of your digits are right, and how many of them sit in the right position — and the next guess is built out of that answer. That is the whole loop, and it repeats until the number is yours. Nothing is dealt, drawn or shuffled, so no round is lost to bad luck: everything you need is already on the screen, inside the guesses you have already made. The game has been on the App Store since February 2016, and what follows is how a round actually goes, mode by mode.
One guess, two numbers back
A turn takes seconds. You type a number, the game reports how many digits are correct and how many of those correct digits are also in the correct place, and then it is your move again. The two counts are not the same information twice. The first one is about composition: which digits the hidden number is made of. The second is about arrangement: whether the digits you got right are where they belong. Keeping them apart is the most useful habit in the game, because a guess that returns several correct digits and none of them in position looks like a miss and is in fact a large piece of the answer — it tells you what to keep, and that every one of those digits has to move somewhere else.
Read the answers, do not just collect them
A beginner guesses, reads the counts, and then guesses something unrelated. The counts only pay off when guesses are compared with each other. Change a single digit between two attempts and the reply becomes a statement about that digit alone: if the number of correct digits goes up, the digit you introduced belongs in the hidden number; if it goes down, the one you dropped did. Keep the same digits and move them instead, and the correct-digit count stays put while the in-position count tells you whether the new arrangement is closer. A zero is worth as much as a high count and often more, because it clears a whole group of digits out of consideration at once — and clearing candidates is what ends the round.
Habits that shorten a round
- Change one thing at a time. A guess that differs from the previous one in a single digit gives you an answer you can attribute; a guess that differs in all of them gives you a number you cannot explain.
- Spend the first attempts on coverage. Early on you are not trying to be right, you are trying to find out which digits are in play, and a guess that rules several of them out has done more work than a near miss.
- Settle composition before arrangement. Work out which digits belong first; putting a known set in order is a much smaller problem than solving both at once.
- Keep the earlier answers in front of you. Every count you have collected still constrains the hidden number, not only the most recent one.
- Do not throw away a guess that returned nothing in position. It still told you which digits are in the number, and that is half of the answer.
Three modes
The menu has three entries, and what changes between them is who is sitting opposite you.
| Mode | Who is opposite you | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Single player | An AI opponent | One player against the machine, with the same guess-and-answer loop and nothing to wait for between turns. |
| Two players | Another player, found through Game Center | Apple's matchmaking pairs exactly two people; the moves travel between the two devices through Apple's servers. |
| Training | Nobody is matched | The third entry in the menu, sitting next to the other two. |
A match against another player
The two-player mode runs entirely through Apple's Game Center. Matchmaking seats exactly two players, and the moves of the match are exchanged between the two devices through Apple's servers rather than through a server of ours — the game does not have one. The person you are matched with sees your Game Center alias, and that is all they see: there is no free-text chat, no voice chat and no photo sharing anywhere in the app. Matches are not recorded either, so the game keeps no history of who you played against. All of this applies only when you are signed in to Game Center on your device.
Leaderboards
The game has Game Center leaderboards, so a good round can be posted rather than only remembered. What goes to Apple for that is your Game Center player identifier and alias together with your scores; the game keeps no user database of its own, because it has no server to keep one on. If you would rather not appear at all, that is a system setting rather than a setting inside the game: Settings, then Game Center, decides what your device shares.
The same idea, if you are on Android
Bulls & Cows is iOS-only; there is no Android version. If you are reading this on an Android phone, the same core exists in a second MagicLampGames title: Codex Numbers, rebuilt in Unity from the original Mastermind Numbers, where a guess is likewise answered with how many digits are correct and how many sit in the right position. Its page, with the store links, is at /games/codex-numbers/
What the game asks of you
The game is free and contains no in-app purchases. It does not ask you to create an account and never asks for your real name, e-mail address, phone number, precise location, contacts, photos or calendar. It does show ads, through Google AdMob, and it does not ask for the App Tracking Transparency permission — so the advertising identifier is not available to it and the ads are not personalised by tracking you across other apps. Progress and settings can follow you between your own devices through your own iCloud account, which is your storage rather than ours: we cannot read it. Notifications only happen if you allow them. The full policy, written by reading the app's own dependency list instead of a template, is at /legal/bulls-and-cows/privacy/
Where to get it
Bulls & Cows: IQ Game is on the App Store, free, with version 1.7.5 live since 8 August 2026 — the game first appeared there on 25 February 2016, which makes it the oldest thing MagicLampGames has published. It is available in thirteen languages: Turkish, English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Arabic. The screenshots, the version currently live and the link to the store listing are on the game page at /games/bulls-and-cows/