About Let's Golf Online
Let's Golf Online is a free 3D golf game that runs in a web browser. There is nothing to download, no account to create, and no payment at any point. You open a page, drag back from the ball, and play.
It is an independent project, built and maintained by one developer as a side project rather than by a studio or a publisher. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any golf club, tournament, governing body, or tour.
What You Can Play
There are three modes:
- Full courses — twelve real course layouts converted from public map data, ranging from four holes to a complete eighteen depending on how well each course is mapped.
- Famous holes — nine individually hand-built holes, each modelled on a well-known single hole and tuned by hand rather than generated.
- Fantasy — a procedurally generated nine-hole course that lays out a new set of fairways, bunkers, water and trees each time you play it.
How the Real Courses Are Built
The real-course layouts are not traced by eye from photographs. They are converted from OpenStreetMap, the collaborative map of the world that volunteers build by surveying on the ground and tracing satellite imagery.
The process runs roughly like this:
- A bounding box around the course is queried through the Overpass API, which returns the golf features mapped inside it — fairways, greens, tee boxes, bunkers, water, and individual trees.
- A converter script groups those features into holes, using
golf=holecentrelines where mappers have drawn them and nearest-green matching where they have not. - Latitude and longitude are projected into metres, then scaled into game units. Each hole is re-centred so its tee sits at the origin.
- The result is written out as the polygon data the 3D game loads directly.
This is why bunker shapes are irregular rather than tidy circles, and why fairways bend the way they do: the outlines are real mapped outlines. Course data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and available under the Open Database Licence.
What We Get Wrong, and Why We Say So
Community-mapped data is uneven, and pretending otherwise would make the game less useful rather than more:
- Some holes are missing. Where a green and a tee could not be matched with confidence, the hole is left out instead of being invented. That is why several courses have fewer than eighteen holes.
- Distances are direct, not card yardages. The figures published on each course page are straight-line tee-to-pin measurements taken from our own geometry. Real scorecards measure along the intended line of play, so a doglegged hole will read shorter here than on the card.
- A few holes measure implausibly. Where the underlying map data produces a distance that cannot be right, we show a dash rather than publish a number we cannot stand behind.
- The physics is a game, not a simulator. Ball flight is tuned to be fun and readable, not to model spin, lie and wind the way a launch monitor would.
Real Course Names
Course and hole names are used descriptively, to say which real-world layout a given set of holes was derived from. All trademarks remain the property of their respective owners. If you represent a club and want something changed, please get in touch.
How It Is Paid For
The game is free to play. Running costs are offset with advertising. There are no paid upgrades, no loot boxes, and no accounts to sell. See our Privacy Policy for what advertising and analytics collect.
Get In Touch
Bug reports, corrections to course data, and suggestions for which course to add next are all welcome. The contact page explains the best way to send each.
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