[GAME] Dots and Boxes

[techietim]

1) CODE TITLE:

Dots and Boxes

2) AUTHOR NAME/NOTES:

techietim

3) DESCRIPTION:

The 2-player game of Dots and Boxes.

4) URL TO CODE:
http://toolbox.techietim.ca/dots_and_boxes/

[Snookerman]

Nice! Works great in FF3 and IE7.

[djr33]

Very cool.

A couple UI suggestions:
1. Instead of just stopping the game when a player has a majority of spaces filled, first actually fill in the rest of the space as blue/red, THEN stop it and say "blue wins", kinda like in chess when you knock the opponent's king over.

2. To make it a bit easier to click, allow clicking in the middle of a square, when that square is going to be colored blue/red. Click on 3 lines, then for the fourth you can either click on the last line or you can click in the center of the square.

3. Finally, to save even more clicking, it would be cool if, when you closed off a region, the entire region should fill in with the color-- so you don't have to work your way out. Generally, it is understood that if you seal off a region of many blocks and could potentially continue to fill them all it, that you then get them all, with just sealing off the outermost one.

Aside from that, great version of the game!

[Snookerman]

One more UI suggestion:
I think it would be nice if the lines would have be highlighted when being hovered. After playing for a few minutes, I noticed that when trying to click the lines I would quite often miss them. Of course you could also make them thicker or make a larger clickable area, but that might be to much, I think highlighting would help a lot.

[techietim]

@Snookerman:
Added :hover on the lines.

@djr:
Since the player can't win if the other player has over >= 51 of the squares, I makes sense to stop the game. The games are usually long enough as is.

Thanks for the suggestions!

[djr33]

Stopping the game is fine, but it would be a really good visual clue if when it stopped the remaining squares all turned blue or red automatically also.

[Nile]

Make the hover a darker grey.

[jlizarraga]

Best game ever.

http://img389.imageshack.us/img389/6797/lolfu8.png

Don't judge me!

[Twey]

Hahahaha

Stopping the game is fine, but it would be a really good visual clue if when it stopped the remaining squares all turned blue or red automatically also.

Maybe, but the board would then not match the scores.

There are quite a few issues with this code, most of which are described in my list of common coding mistakes.

[jscheuer1]

Just from the perspective of playing the game, I found it boring. Perhaps if you could get the computer to play one of the colors . . .

Anyways, reminds me of battleship, which can be fun as long as you don't have to play both 'hands'.