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 source

You can download a ZIP file (41K) of all the files you need to run Automaton Wars in Java from your own hard disc, without being on-line (MSIE4beta doesn't cope with doing this, but Netscape 3 does). This file also contains all the source code. You are free to do whatever you like with the source, so long as you don't claim it was written by anyone other than me. Downloading doesn't work from inside bonus.com -- if you are reading this in a bonus.com window, you need to go to http://www.ant.co.uk/~peter/java/autowars.htm in a "real" browser window first.

The two ".class" files in that ZIP file must end up called Automaton.class and AutomatonBoard.class ... this is only a problem if you're using a DOS-based unzipper that only understands short, 8.3 filenames. Even then it may work if you rename the class files after unzipping.

The "Hall of Fame"

See also

	Automaton Wars for Acorn RiscOS
	Gamelan > Games > Board games
	Jars > Java resources > Games
	Internet Games at Gates96

All Rites Reversed -- Copy What You Like