1.9 Same — Dot-Removing Game
To play Same, run the PLT Games program. (Under Unix, it’s called plt-games).
The object of Same is to score points by removing blobs from the board.
1.9.1 The Rules
To remove a blob, click on it. As long the blob is not just a simple circle, it will disappear. After the blob disappears, the remaining pieces of the board shift around, breaking up blobs into new blobs as pieces of the old blobs fall down to fill in the empty space. If an entire column is wiped out, all of the blobs from the right will slide left to take up the empty column’s space.
As an example, imagine a board looked like this:
There are two places where we can click, on the green blob or on the purple one. Clicking on the green one results in this board:
Notice the new horizontal blue blob that has appeared. That appears because the blue ball falls down into the vacated space and joins into the two adjacent blue balls.
Next, if we ignore that new blue blob and click the purple one, we get this board:
The blue circle has continued falling, which breaks up our blue blob and no new one appears because the blue circle is now next to brown circles.
If, however, we had clicked on blue blob before clicking on the purple one, we would get this board:
and then clicking the purple one would produce this board:
Note that the purple blob was the only blob in its column, so clicking on it shifts all of the columns to the right over to eliminate the empty space.
1.9.2 Scoring
Your score increases for each ball removed from the board, in two ways. First, when you remove a blob, you get as many points as the square of the number of cells the blob occupied, so removing bigger blobs is better. Second, if there are fewer than 50 cells occupied on the board, you get a bonus. Specifically if you have 49 cells left, you get a 100 point bonus, 48 cells left yields a 200 point bonus, 47 cells a 300 point bonus etc., and if there are no cells left, you get a 5000 point bonus.
Click the New Game button to play again.