Player 1 starts in the lower left corner, player 2 in the upper
right. Each turn players choose one color to add to their territory.
Then, all adjacent tiles of that color are captured. The first player
to capture 50% of the field wins. Press Up/Down to pick a color, and
Spacebar/Return to make the move before time runs out.
See screenshot:
[26 Apr 2005]
Version 1.0.5 is out. Basque translation added. Minor bugfixes.
[25 Jul 2004]
Version 1.0.4 is out. German translation added. Minor bugfixes.
[28 May 2004]
Version 1.0.3 is out. Minor user interface enhancements - it's now possible to play the game with mouse entirely.
Selection box no longer skips forbidden colors. Win32 build also released (newer Lazarus helped remove some inconveniences of Win32 version).
[01 May 2004]
Version 1.0.2 is out. Added Polish translation, new themes, fixed a nasty bug.
[15 Apr 2004]
Version 1.0.1 is out.
Jesus Reyes has made a Win32 build, so those deprived of the joys of Linux can now play the game too!
Russian and Spanish translations available
You can download either the source or the binaries, although I have to recommend
the binaries - the game was built with Lazarus libraries, and you will have to
download them separately (try http://lazarus.freepascal.org/).
Without fresh Lazarus and FreePascal the source code is not going to be of much use
to you.
Having Red Hat and Debian packages would be really great (hint! hint!)
You have an option of downloading normal i386 binaries or binaries with i686 optimizations. This is done to compensate for the inconvenient source code.
colorsnatch-1.0.5-linux-i386.tar.bz2
colorsnatch-1.0.5-linux-i686.tar.bz2
colorsnatch-1.0.5-win32.7z
As of now, Windows binary package is distributed in a 7zip archive format (get the free archiver at http://7-zip.org/. The move to 7z was made because the 7z archive is 2.5 times smaller than the conventional zip, and the 7zip archiver is free and open source anyway. Give it a try.
Just copy the binary files (you'll have to compile them first, of course, if you only have the source) to the directory you want them to sit in. You would also wish to make a link in your /bin directory or in your Gnome/KDE/whatever menus.
This program is free software, you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
The GNU General Public License is available in the COPYING file supplied with the game. You can also find it on the GNU site
There is a German page about Colorsnatch by Stefan Weinreich
There is a very interesting project, Java Color Expansion, that implements the same game from a different approach - and is written in Java. They focused on the AI and it looks like they have achieved some outstanding results.
ColorSnatch is inspired by a wonderful game I used to play on my 80286 machine. The game, called 'Filler', was written in 1990 by Dmitri Pashkov, Michael Katunsky and Alexander Corabelnikov.
In that time programming was still an art; now it is craft at best. The games had original ideas, they had performance, they had style, they were FUN. Sigh. The 'Filler' game was one of the first PC games I ever played, so I made this clone/remake/whatever chiefly because of nostalgia.
I also wanted to test the Lazarus library/IDE, which I discovered only recently. The game took only a couple of days of actual programming, so I suppose Lazarus is a mighty RAD tool already and only going to improve.
ColorSnatch was written from scratch in Pascal language using the Lazarus IDE. Lazarus is a Delphi-compatible free and open source visual components library and IDE for various platforms. For example, ColorSnatch was written and compiled under Linux OS (specifically, ASPLinux9, with kernel 2.4.20).
For more info on Lazarus, visit http://lazarus.freepascal.org/
The images and icons for the game were made with The GIMP, first with 1.2 version and then with 2.0 as soon as it was available.
For more info on The GIMP, visit http://gimp.org/
Visit ColorSnatch project page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/colorsnatch/
or e-mail me at dlianda at sourceforge dot net