The summer this year was different for most of us in many ways. But still - summer is summer and I hope you all had a fantastic time. I took occasion to take a fresh look at one of my favorite games - AbaCruX. AbaCruX is based on peg solitaire and this is a bit of a project of passion to be quite honest. It has been close to 14 years of upgrades for what was one of the earliest apps for iOS, but version 3.0 packs by far the biggest punch.
Peg solitaire was a coffee-table curiosity in the 18th and 19th centuries. A self-contained unit of entertainment for one. Games were fabricated in stylish, luxorious and often very expensive fashion with beautiful wood or marble boards and exquisite little pearls that sometimes even found a circular rail of sorts in the board itself, so they wouldn't get lost. Some immensely beautiful. There was that tiny bit of an addictive nature to it. Like the card game patience but much more abstract in its mathematical nature. As it turns out the solution search space - a sum of all possible jumps and moves - is beyond enormous. So, there is a lot of depth and variety to this game. It requires strategic thinking of the highest level especially the more complex boards.
AbaCruX started its life in the late 1990s as a Macintosh application. A basic version implementing the English board. The word app didn't yet exist. It was distributed as shareware - mailed on floppy disks. A couple of years later AbaCruX was ported to Palm OS (Palm Pilot) and was subsequently distributed in a variety of app stores in those times of the Wild West of app stores - all of them now extinct. Then came the iPhone and with it the demise of the PDA in general. AbaCruX was one of the first apps in the new 'iPhone App Store' as it was called back in the day. 2 boards with 15 puzzles for each. Well, things have changed a bit in the new version 3.
We combined 3 platforms into one and added AppleTV. Your game now automatically becomes available on Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. Same goes for add-on purchases. If one were to get the very cool 'Extra Boards' add-on on an iPhone, it would become available for all other included platforms as well. The somewhat more exciting news about AbaCruX is that the basic version now comes with 120 configurations on 8 boards. Four times as many as previously. There is the brandnew game engine, fabulous animations, positional audio, a secondary scoring metric and Game Center integration. It is a brand-new game. Not only because of all the new features. No, it literally is a new game.
In the last decade there was much renewed scientific interest in peg solitaire. Quite a few papers were published detailing different approaches for solving the game. Mostly in regards to the English Board, sometimes the French or Diamond boards. Not as straight-forward as one might think and illustrative of what big numbers really are. Computers, however, have gotten fast enough with enough memory and storage as well for a brute-force approach on the central game and some of the other boards. The French board caught the attention of fans and academics alike for a while. Many more boards made an appearance. Boards like the Wiegleb board which dates back several centuries or the Siege board which may never have been a board meant for this purpose at all. AbaCruX now comes with 8 boards and an optional add-on of 8 more complex boards.
AbaCruX 3.0 also uses a secondary scoring system which is tied to Game Center and to make things a little more exciting players now have to beat the clock when solving specific configurations. As a result 2 scores are awarded each round. Stars and points. Stars are needed to unlock new configurations while points are used for competition in Game Center. The point scoring system takes number of moves, time taken and other parameters into consideration.
So, that's the 411 for now. More to come. If you are reading this, you may already have this exciting new version of an old favorite installed. If not, give it a shot. AbaCruX 3.0 is now available in your app store. Please, check out those add-ons, they help us survive.
