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Gates96
and
Bonus.com
 
Bonus.com game
of the day,
13 Mar 1998!

Gamespotter
Gamespotter.com
game of the week
23 Jan 2000!

Now also available in Hebrew! Check out Alef Efes...

[Then the Saviour continued, saying, "Woe to you, javaless ones, who have no hope, who rely on things that will not happen!"

-- The Book Of Thomas The Contender]


[It all comes out the wrong colours in MSIE4. It's not my fault, honest!]
[Reportedly, Netscape 2.02 for OS/2 Warp 3 has trouble too.]

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

Automaton Wars is NOT COPYRIGHTED and is NOT distributed under the GNU General Public Licence.

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"

On 21st February 1999, I moved these pages to a new server. I haven't got the "Hall of Fame" highscore table stuff going on the new server yet. Apologies.

See also

Automaton Wars for Acorn RiscOS  
Gamelan > Games > Board games
Jars > Java resources > Games
Internet Games at Gates96
(K) All Rites Reversed -- Copy What You Like