This is a clone of the two-player browser game Area, written in Python.

Download the ready-for-use release for your operating system.

Install platform-specific dependencies

• Python 2.7
• wxPython 3.0 (graphical interface)

and with pip

• tabulate 0.7 (for debugging output)
• hypothesis 3.1 (for unit tests)

The latter two are not strictly necessary to run the game if the appropriate lines in the source are commented out.

Clone the source to your local file system with

git clone https://github.com/fricklerhandwerk/area

Enter

python area/area/gui.py

to run the game.

To control the game, press the NUM keys displayed or click the appropriate player's color buttons.

BACKSPACE (DEL on Ubuntu) resets the game.

ESC quits the game.

The player who first occupies at least half the board wins.

You need to install this game on your computer.

This has some advantages. It loads and runs much faster than the original, which must be downloaded each time you play and is encapsuled in your browser. You can also modify the source code and improve it if you like.

You nead an actual person next to you to play it.

Other than that, the game is somewhat simpler behind the scenes. It doesn't count rounds and a player cannot give up. Just reset the game.

Also it doesn't have any sounds that indicate which player took the lead. This should be obvious from the score bars.

If you don't like to share a mouse or trackpad, just press the according keyboard key to choose a color.

Currently you are only offered colors that are available, so you can't accidentally choose a color that doesn't grow your area. If you are completely surrounded by your oppenent's color, you can choose any other, but naturally it won't increase your score.

Probably the most notable difference concerns game mechanics. Your score takes all enclosed areas into account. That is, parts of the board that are not reachable for your opponent, since they are surrounded by your area, belong to you, even if you have not colored them yet.

There are actually four modes for handling enclosed areas, which you can set in the source code:

• don't count (original behavior)
• only count to determine if player has already won
• count as score (default)
• color immediately

To provide the game for people not familiar with Python or the command line or not wanting to install dependencies separately, it is possible to package the game as a single executable file.

Make sure py2app is installed and you are in the source directory.

Then in the command line, enter

python setup.py py2app

After this in dist you will have Area.app, which can be distributed and started like any other app by double clicking the app icon.

Scaling the window produces artifacts because of the way the board is drawn. This should be rebuilt such that you can scale the window to any size, but always have square cells (± 1 px) and no artifacts. The score bars should compensate for the window's aspect ratio.

The game uses color identifiers such as "red" or "green", which are subject to interpretation, but easy to read in the source. Also there are no font settings used, hence key strings on buttons appear in the system default font. Therefore the game may look very different on different operating systems or distributions.

It may be appropriate to fix appearance with numerical color codes.

Please submit packaging and installation instructions for common Linux distributions or Windows!