Anyways, you basically inflate the circles with your own colour, and when they explode, they will fill the surrounding ones. Aim is to fill the board with all your own colour.
Corners take 2 turns to fill, edges 3, and any other 4. They will spill vertically and horizontally into neighbouring circles. – [Author’s statement]
This is surprisingly really fun for how simple it is! An interesting idea.
The idea is pretty old (the original version dates to 1982), but I like the graphics in this one. AI could use some work though: since the computer insists on always making a move in a space next to a cell you occupy, you can always respond by clicking on that cell so they will never get a chance to cause a single explosion, with a few easy-to-avoid exceptions around the edge of the board.
Oh, interesting! I know this game as “Overload” from the C64, and I thought it traced back to a VIC20 game. Didn’t know about Hexplode.
I’ve had an unfinished prototype knocking around for several years which is basically an expansion of these rules. It’s almost finished actually, I really should get around to releasing it one of these days…
Huh! That looks pretty neat.
This is one of those games that combinatorists like to geek out over, because it’s a realization of a pretty well-known dynamical system on graphs known as a “sandpile model”. I’ve been at more than one math talk where a member of the audience asked if the speaker had played this game. But I haven’t seen much in the way of variations, and I think there’s still a lot of ground to explore.
>I think there’s still a lot of ground to explore.
Definitely. Throw in some great art & style, a few variations, and it seems like a ripe, glistening opportunity for a dev looking for something simple to put out on mobile.
Holy crap, this is WAY deeper than I thought it was. I had about 80% of the board captured, and the blue only had a few circles, I thought it was pretty much over, but then the chain-capturing started!
Reminds me of a combination of Go & TripleTown. That’s a fucking awesome thing.
Most of the early game is automatic, maybe start with 50% or 75% of the board pre-populated?
20 years ago… back on the Atari ST… chain reaction! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AltbPexTcn8
It even featured up to 6 players (AI or real) leading to pure havoc usually 🙂