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xtic - X version of a simple but tricky board game
The board is
made up of 4x4 squares and 16 pieces. The pieces carry 4 properties each,
namely:
- o Black or brown
- o Horizontal or vertical
- o Solid or hollow
- o
Round or square
This makes a total of 16 possible pieces and there are
exactly one piece of each type (so each piece can be represented by a binary
number of length 4).
Initially, the board is empty and it is successively
filled with pieces. The game is over when a row, a column or a diagonal
has four pieces carrying a common property in it, e.g. four black pieces.
The player who places the fatal piece loses.
The game is a two-player game,
although in the current release, only the human-computer combination is
supported. Player 1 (the human by default) chooses one of the 16 pieces.
Player 2 (the computer by default) places this piece on one of the 16
squares of the board and chooses a piece out of the remaining 15 pieces
which he gives to player 1, who places this piece on one of the remaining
15 squares on the board, etc.
As mentioned above, the game is over when
a player places a piece in such a way that a row, a column or a diagonal
(but see below) contains four pieces carrying a common property. The player
who places this piece loses. If there is no empty square left, we have a
draw (yes, this can happen).
There are two menus, the Actions
Menu and the Options Menu.
- New game - You start
- Starts a new
game of xtic, ending the previous one abruptly and letting the human start.
- New game - I start
- Identical to "New game - You start" except that the computer
will begin the next game.
- Quit
- Exist from xtic.
- Level trivial
- The easiest level. The computer only tries to place the selected piece in
a way that it does not lose immediately, and chooses any free piece to
give away, i.e. it thinks only one move ahead.
- Level easy
- The computer thinks
two moves ahead.
- Level medium
- The computer thinks three moves ahead.
- Level
hard
- The computer thinks four moves ahead.
- Level very hard
- The computer
thinks five moves ahead.
- Level don't try
- The computer thinks six moves ahead.
This can be quite slow (and hard).
- Game Type: normal
- In addition to the
rows and columns, the two main diagonals are dangerous (can make the game
end).
- Game Type: nodiags
- Only the rows and columns are dangerous.
- Game Type:
torus
- All 8 "diagonals" are dangerous. This corresponds to playing on a
torus.
Probably plenty. Report any you find to mjo@math.kth.se
Mattias
Jonsson, Dept of Mathematics, Royal Institute of Technology, S-100 44 Stockholm,
Sweden.
email: mjo@math.kth.se, URL: http://www.math.kth.se/~mjo
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