I know, I know, I’ve been a bad Sushi and still haven’t written up the Neil Gaiman event. The Debian games are eating my soul, though.
In one game, Five or More, you remove marbles from a board by lining five or more of them up in a row. However, if you don’t remove them from a board in a given turn, three more marbles are added to the board. Since the game tells what marbles are going on the board next, you can plan strategically and decide what to move where with a catch. The marble can only roll. It can’t jump or skip anywhere. Since you don’t know where the marbles are going next, there’s also an element of luck involved, which has led to much frustration on my part toward the end when the board is nearly full and I have only a few possible moves but even fewer that would be beneficial.
Then there’s Same GNOME, where you try to clear the board. If you remove n touching blocks of the same color at a time, you gain (n-2)^2 points, so it’s to your advantage to clear the chunks of lower (or no points since you can’t remove individual blocks) value just to remove huge chunks. My highest individual chunk is 961 points, and this game earns huge nerdity out of me because I try to maximize the number of points at a time. So far my high score on the small board is over 3,000. That’s the only size I can stand to play on because the medium and large boards have to be expanded to the full screen in order to be visible to me.
This system also has versions of Minesweeper and Tetris. I played Minesweeper in phases in Windows, mostly during exam time when I was in school. It was a wonderful way to put off studying, and Tetris was another great way. Now that I’ve discovered all the games, could the end of my writing career be nigh? Forget Leechblock; I need something to block the games.