Gamazons 0.83 review

Amazons is a game played on a 10x10 chess board

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 252K Developer: Ronald Yorgas

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Amazons is a game played on a 10x10 chess board. Each side has four pieces (amazons) that move like chess queens (in a straight line in any direction). Instead of capturing pieces like in chess, the game is determined based on who moves last.

Each move consists of two parts. First an amazon moves to a new square and then fires an arrow to another square (the arrow is fired in a straight line in any direction from the square the amazon landed on).

The square the arrow lands on becomes a permenant block for the rest of the game. No one can move over it, or fire an arrow over it. Every turn an amazon must move and fire an arrow, so every turn there is one less square available on the board. Try and block in your opponent or section off a good chunk of the board for yourself.

This is a Gnome 2 app, so that must be installed on your system for it to work. Other than that, from the main directory, type "./configure" to generate the necessary makefiles. Then make, make install to compile and install the game. Then type gamazons to start the game.

Note: I've heard reports of the ./configure erroring out on RH8 with the following message:
checking for libgnomeui-2.0... Package libgnomeui-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.

Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libgnomeui-2.0.pc' to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'libgnomeui-2.0' found
This problem can be fixed by installing the libgnomeui-devel-2.0.3-3 RPM file.

You can set the player settings from the settings->player menu. You can set it to play AI vs AI or whatever you like.

However, I do have a few default option overrides. For instance, when you get near the end of the game and you don't feel like brainlessly moving a bunch of pieces that are already blocked off into their own areas, you can click on "Auto Finish" which will set both players as AI with a 1 second think time. Also, if you get a little tired of waiting for the AI to move (perhaps you set the time to think too long), you can click on the Force Move button and make him move right then.

Things that aren't implemented yet are the network and help menus. Also the undo button doesn't do anything yet (although I've pretty much got the framework to do it).