Topic: The Hive Game is a puzzle and board game made for Windows and Linux systems

[Software Santa]

The Hive Game is a puzzle and board game made for Windows and Linux systems (And Maybe MacOS) ... Requires Python 2.6 or Later to Run - not updated since 2009.

https://launchpad.net/hivegame

Introduction
Welcome the The Hive Game. As you can see from the screenshot it is called Hive Game because it looks like one. Imagine you are a beemaster which has to take care on the hive's health. Unfortunately there is a bee virus around which infects bee hives. Your task is to vaccinate the hive to get rid of the infection. The rules chapter tells you how to vaccinate the cells of the hive. If you do this in a clever way you will be able to protect your hive from getting completely infected by the virus.


Rules
You play this game against the computer. You are the beemaster who vaccinates the cells. The computer plays the part of the virus who tries to infect more and more cells of you hive. At the beginning you will see an almost empty hive with some red and blue cells. If you have not changed the default options you own the red cells and the computer will play the blue cells. You start by clicking on one of your red cells. Then the neighbour cells of the one you clicked are marked in grey color. There are two types of neighbour cells, near neighbours and far neighbours. The near ones are the cells which are direct neighbours of the selected cell. The far neighbours are the ones which are in contact to the near neighbours. You can also think of two circles around your selected cell. In the inner circle are the near neighbours and the outer circles is the one with the far neighbours.

The neighbourhood cells are the ones that can be vaccinated. You can click either on near or far neighbours. It is also possible to deselect your first choice by clicking on that cell again or be clicking on another red cell. The difference between near and far neighbours is the way in which you move. When you click on a near cell your vaccine grows from the cell you selected to the neighbour cell. Therefore you own at least two cells when you select a near neighbour. Selecting a far neighbour will cause a jump of the vaccine to that far neighbour. You loose the origin cell but own the far neighbour cell that you jumped to.

When you grow or jump to a neighbour cell all infected cells (the blue ones) which are in touch with your new cell will be cured. That means they turn to red. To make a long story short, here are the steps again:

    select one of your cells
    select where to grow or jump to (the grey cells)
    see which infected cells are vaccinated now (blue cells turn to red cells)

Now the computer will make his move according to the same rules. At the bottom of the screen are two message areas. In the left corner you see a score which counts the difference of owned cells. For example, if there are 20 blue cells and 15 red cells the score will show -5. A negative number indicates that you are on the way of loosing the game. In the example you are 5 cells behind the opponent. In the right corner a message explains the next step that you should do, e.g.: select a cell, grow or jump, etc.

Step by step you and the computer occupy more and more cells. The game ends when either one cannot make a valid move regardless if there are any empty cells left. The player with the most cells wins the game. It both have the same number of owned cells the game ends tied.

Options

Hive Options
At the top of the screen is a menu bar which contains some push buttons. Most of them are self-explanatory. Clicking the NEW button will start a new game. The PREFERENCES button opens a dialog where you can make several settings like game strength, who starts the game etc. When you leave the dialog with the SAVE buttom all your changes will be saved even if you restart the program. The HELP buttom opens this help page in your web browser. The EXIT button will close the game.

The game strength can be set to four levels. Strength 'easy' is for absolute beginners or for children. The computer does not really try to win the game. He just tries to make the move which gives him the highest degree of freedom, that is the most possible opportunities for the next move. With strength 'medium' he will optimize the number of occupied cells but also takes the degrees of freedom into account. It's a bit harder to beat him. When playing in strength 'hard' the computer uses the medium algorithms but also looks for clustering. He tries to keep his peaces together. Now it is not so easy to win for you. The fourth strength is called 'adaptive'. This is more a combination of the other game strengths. Depending on the game score the computer switches between easy, medium and hard. When he thinks he will loose the game the computer shifts gear and vice versa. At a score of -5 the game strength will be switched from 'easy' to 'medium', above 0 the computer switches from 'medium' to 'hard'.
With the next option you can choose who makes the first move: you or the computer.

In the bottom area of the options window you can see the 'Hall of Fame'. It lists the best results for each of the four games strengths. These values are changed whenever you  reach a higher score than the current best one. The 'Hall of Fame' cannot be reseted. A value of -100 is the default setting; your result will always be better than -100.

The game's help can be opened with the HELP button. That will open a local html file in your web browser. That's the file you are reading now.

Extract the downloaded ZIP file to a folder of your choice. In order to start the file 'hive.py' which is the program file, an installation of Python 2.6.1 is required. On most Linux systems an installation of Python already exists. On Windows systems you can start the 'hive.py' by double clicking because the extension *.py has been linked to Python when you installed Python.

https://launchpad.net/hivegame