Day 10 Game 10: 30 games in 30 days using Grids

[button url=”http://www.gamelogic.co.za/examples/30-games-in-30-days/game10/” size=”large”]CLICK HERE TO PLAY GAME 10 [/button]
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[slogan]This is what Grids did for us today. What can Grids do for you?[/slogan]

To win game 10, you have to block all the ant paths by placing dominos in their way. This game is played on a rectangular grid, and involves both the faces, and the edges of the grid. It’s based on a “classical” polyomino problem: pack a rectangle with dominoes so that there are no “faults”, where a fault is a straight line between blocks not blocked by any domino. (In our version of the game, you don’t have to fill the entire grid – it makes it slightly easier.. but not much 🙂 This problem cannot be transferred to any grids; for example, hex grids are always fault-free.

There are several ways to deal with edges when it comes to grids:

• You can store edge information in your grid cells (in this case, you would only need to store two edges per cell, and you would need a slightly bigger grid).
• You can use an edge grid (this is similar to the concept of a vertex dual grid, but it’s not a dual).
• You can use a compound grid that represents both edges and faces. For hex grids, this solution can be very elegant; for square grids, it’s not bad but it is not the best.
• Or you can use a dictionary with two indices (one for each face); the entry represents the edge between the two faces (if it exists).

For this game, we used an approach similar to the last, but we simplified it a bit so that edge-paths are easily represented, and we simply maintain whether paths are blocked or not.

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Click here to check out all 30 games 

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