Cohesion Adhesion Balls

Player having the last move wins the game.

Description

In each of the cells on a 3×3 board there is a ball of one of four colors. The color of a ball signifies its strength or power. The four colors from the weakest to the strongest are yellow, green, magenta, red. The balls can move vertically or horizontally such that when two of them happen in the same cell then, if they are of the same strength both disappear; otherwise, only the weakest of the two disappears. To make a move a player selects a ball and a direction (by clicking on a adjacent ball). The ball moves in the chosen direction until it reaches the rim of the board or perishes by running into a stronger ball. Balls must interact on each move, i.e., a ball can't move without hitting another ball. The player to make the last move wins.(Idea from gameintellect.com, cut-the-knot.org)

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.4 (R2007a)

[John D'Errico]

A moderately cute game, athough it appears to be a win for the (I won't tell you which) player.

The interface/help is better than those previous submissions by this author, but its still a bit kludgy. There is no help in the function itself. When you start the game, a few lines of help that explain how to play appear in the command window. You are requested to hit any key to continue. Not stated is that you must apparently hit any key, then hit the enter key. A figure now appears. I tried this once, and nothing happens. The mouse clicks on the figure fail to work as claimed. As it turns out, there were further instructions that appeared in the command window AFTER the figure was created. Sadly, the figure window covered up the command window, so I never saw those additional instructions. The additional instructions force you to return control to the command window to type a 0 or 1. Hit the enter key again, and then bring focus back to the figure window with your mouse. Of course, if you chose to let the computer move first, you don't see which move the computer made!

After the game is done (very quickly!) If you wish to play a second game, you need to go through all of this again, with the focus swapping between figure and command windows several times.

I'm sorry, but this is a terribly poor interface. A far better choice would have been to put a button or two on the figure window. The author could easily have done this.

With a good interface, I'd have rated this a 4. In order to gain a 5 rating from me, the author would have to allow the user to choose the board size, and/or number of colors in the game. As the interface is, its just barely over a 2 rating. Its too bad, since this was not a terrible game.