Gridlock 1.10 review

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Gridlock is a collection of 30 grid-based strategy board games for Linux, including Ataxx, Reversi, Checkers, Gomoku, Connect Four, a

License: BSD License
File size: 225K
Developer: Brian Nenninger
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Gridlock is a collection of 30 grid-based strategy board games for Linux, including Ataxx, Reversi, Checkers, Gomoku, Connect Four, and more. They are individually described in the "Games" section.

After launching the application, the game window will appear. Select the game you want to play from the "Game" popup menu in the upper right. Some games have different variations (board size, layout, etc); when one of those games are selected a "Variations" popup menu will appear from which you can select a variation.

The bottom right displays the color and status of the two players. Each player's color is shown by a circle; the player whose turn it is has a filled circle. For games in which players have a score, the scores are shown next to the player labels. Popup windows underneath each player's label allow you to specify whether each player is human or computer-controlled, and the difficulty of computer players. (Note that "Hard" and "Very Hard" computer opponents may take several seconds to make each move).

The rest of the window contains the game board. To make a move, click on the cell where you wish to place a piece. Some games require that you move from one cell to another; to do this first click on the cell you wish to move from, then click on the cell you wish to move to. (In some games such as Checkers you may be able to make a move containing several jumps; to do this click on each cell you wish to jump to in sequence).

For all games, cells that are legal moves will become highlighted when you move the mouse over them. A black dot indicates the position of the last move. If you are unable to make a move, you can pass by clicking the "Pass" button on the right. The "Restart" button will restart the game, requiring confirmation if a game is in progress.

The "Preferences..." menu item in the main Gridlock menu opens the Preferences window, which allows you to change the appearance of the game pieces, and to enable or disable the animation when they are captured. Game pieces can either be bitmap images chosen from the popup menus, or solid colors chosen from the color wells.

Games can be saved and restored using the "Save" and "Open" commands in the Game menu. Games are saved with their full move history, so you can save a game after it is finished, open it later, and undo moves back to the beginning.

The Edit menu contains Undo and Redo commands. Selecting Undo will back the game up to the last time it was a human player's turn. There is no limit to how many moves can be undone. Selecting Redo will redo a move that was previously undone, but only if no new moves were made after the undo.

The Window menu contains commands to toggle the display of network and statistics drawers. The network drawer is described below and is primarily used to chat with your opponent during a network game. The statistics drawer shows a table listing all the moves that have been made in the current game, and information on the analysis performed during the last move made by a computer player.

Requirements:
GNUstep

What's New in This Release:
Added 6 new games.
Built as universal binary for PowerPC and Intel processors. (Intel version is completely untested; if you have access to OS X for x86 let me know how it runs).
Fixed display bugs when user interface scaling is active in Tiger.

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