I just learned that this is a three-day weekend in America, so here’s a free-ranging game you can play to while away the hours until Tuesday morning: hinversi.
I looked for hinversi in both Debian and Arch but didn’t see it in either; a few more searches suggest no one has it in their collection. So if you’re looking to break into the package maintainer business without devoting an immense amount of effort … here’s a quick and easy one.
hinversi is a rendition of the decades-old Reversi board game where players take turns placing two-color tokens on a board. If your token makes a straight line that ends with the same color, everything on that line changes to your color.
Don’t confuse this with gomoku, which was more like “connect five” than Reversi. This will require a little thought. Not as much as Air War or Star Fleet Battles, but a strategic challenge nonetheless.
At first glance I thought I wouldn’t like hinversi, because I could see some resemblance between it and gnuchess, which has devolved in my mind to one of the worst possible games for the console ever.
But hinversi takes after scribble more than gnuchess and its ilk, and is quite playable in spite of its scrolling-gameplay effects.
Even better, there are enough prompts and visual elements to make hinversi a much more enjoyable experience than smashing my forehead against the screen when I pretend I’m playing chess with my computer. (It feels good when I stop. … 😡 )
A rule file is part of the source file package, as is installation guidance and a few other goodies. I didn’t require any special libraries to build hinversi, but it’s also possible I have something esoteric installed that I’m not aware of. If you run into issues, contact me and we’ll compare notes. 😉
Inconsolation 