Losing Games
Seeing as I’m ostensibly a game scholar (and not just a reader!), I should probably write about games occasionally, huh? Being on break and away from the lab, I’ve done a lot more reading than playing, but I still do play games just about every day. Mostly it’s for fun, right now, but I’m always on the lookout for interesting game properties that I might end up thinking and writing about.
Right now I’m playing Chuzzle, which is a game basically designed for OCD people like myself. It’s a standard casual game based on the Bejeweled model of making matches based on color. The twist here is that you can slide cute little fuzzy guys on either the horizontal or vertical axis to make groups of three or more instead of just swapping adjacent pieces. In other words, each Chuzzle moves like a rook in chess, but pushing all the other Chuzzles in its row or column ahead of it. This makes board position rather important, particularly as only getting “combos” (one or more groups of three with a single move) or “supers” (five or more Chuzzles in a group) can stave off the “locks” that prevent certain rows or columns from moving until they’re freed.
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