The Rules

• The two players, blue and red, take it in turns to place pieces on the board. You can place a piece either on a blank square, or on a square already occupied by some of your own pieces.
• When the number of pieces on a square reaches the critical mass for that square (two for corners, three for edges, four elsewhere), that square explodes, and scatters the pieces on it in all four directions. If any of these scattering pieces lands on your opponent's pieces, they are captured and become yours.
• If this scattering causes other squares to exceed their critical mass, then they explode too, and so on, until either the explosions stop or there are only one player's pieces still on the board.
• That player's the winner!
• To help you, squares that only need one more piece to explode are coloured slightly lighter.

The site

Find Automaton Wars on the Internet at http://www.ant.co.uk/~peter/java/autowars.htm.

And a challenge

When set to "not so thick" mode, the computer player is pretty good. If you can beat it regularly (or indeed at all) then you're doing better than I am and I'd like to hear from you!

The "hall of fame" feature of Automaton Wars won't work when running it from this archive, as the applet security model won't let it open the necessary connection to www.ant.co.uk.

All Rites Reversed -- Copy What You Like