Borders 2003, Professional Edition

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Gameplay

Object:

To outlive the other players.

Summary:

Borders is pretty similar to the Tron Light Cycles game, or Snafu, if you can remember that one.

Each player is represented by a colored line. The line constantly moves in one of four directions, North, South, East, or West. Players may change the direction of their line, but they may not stop it or change its speed. Players may only move to board spaces that are empty or that contain the players safe color. If a player moves on to any other board space their game is over. The game continues until only a single player remains.

Game Setup:

The game begins with all players starting near the center of the board, facing each other. For each player in the game, three safe boxes will be drawn at random locations. Players may enter a box in their own safe color, but not in other player's boxes. For example, if player one is red, she may cross into any box drawn in bright red, but not into any bright blue boxes. By the same rule, the blue player may enter the bright blue boxes, but not the bright red ones.

Bombs:

Each player is given a number of minibombs and megabombs at startup. This number is user definable, and can be changed from the Game Settings dialog. The default is for 10 minibombs and 1 megabomb.

Minibombs clear away a small amount of the game board, allowing any player to cross the cleared area.

Megabombs flood a large area of the board with the player's safe color. Any other player caught in the blast radius will have to bomb their way out, or die trying. If the Restock Megabombs selection is enabled (from the Game Settings dialog), then when all players have exhausted their supply of megabombs, all will be fully restocked.

Players:

A game can include 1 to 4 players at a time. Up to three of those players can be human controlled, although you'll all have to share the keyboard. It is also possible to set 4 computer players against each other, if you're the type who just likes to watch.

Control:

The arrow keys change the direction of your line, the comma key launches a minibomb, and the period key launches a megabomb.

Other key sets can be selected from the Player Settings dialog.

Requirements

Borders is written in Python, and uses the wxPython library. You'll need both of these to play Borders.

Windows users...

1. From the Python 2.2 page, download and run the Python 2.2 installer for Windows.
2. From the wxWindows download page, download and install the appropriate wxWindows for Python 2.2 package for your version of Windows.

Linux users...

1. From the Python 2.2 for Linux page, download and install the appropriate version of Python 2.2 for your platform.
2. From the wxWindows download page, download and install the appropriate wxWindows for Python 2.2 package for your version of Linux.

Download

Borders 2003, Professional Edition is provided as a .zip file. To play the game, unzip the file and execute Borders2003.py.

History

Borders is inspired by its namesake, a game I used to play on the TRS-80 back in the mid 80's, in Ms. Weber's computer class. Not long after that class, I wrote a version of Borders for gwbasic on the Tandy 1000 with a friend of mine. It was probably the first real program either of us ever wrote (where real program is defined as a program that someone besides the programmer might be remotely interested in.) Since then, Borders has become my ``first program'' in a number of other languages. When it came time to learn Python and wxWindows, Borders was a natural first step.