It feels like these cards are just warmups for the main part of the game which are the advanced and expert cards. Most of these cards I was able to solve within the first couple attempts. I would consider the beginning and intermediate cards to be quite easy. The game is very simple to play with just a couple of rules that children should not have much trouble understanding. Overall I would consider Cool Moves to be a light to moderate strategy puzzle game. The game plays better if you play it for a short time and then come back to it at a later date. Since the game doesn’t really change from puzzle to puzzle, I find it hard for someone to want to play the game for long stretches of time. The gameplay never changes and a lot of the puzzles are very similar with only a couple of the penguins being in different locations. Every puzzle is essentially the same except for a different arrangement of penguins at the beginning. The repetitive nature is the biggest problem that I had with Cool Moves. At about the 25th puzzle I started to get bored with the concept of the game and it will probably be quite a while before I pick up the game again. After playing some puzzles I started to bore of the game and had to put it away for a while and come back to it later. I don’t see it as a game that you would want to play for more than 30 minutes at a time. It is the type of game that you would only want to play in short doses though. Fun But RepetitiveĪs I have already mentioned, when I was a kid I enjoyed playing Hi-Q. The player has successfully completed the puzzle. The player has removed all but one of the penguins. The objective of each puzzle is to eliminate all but one of the penguins one by one. To set up the puzzle, place a penguin piece on the corresponding spaces on the game board. Each card features a picture of the game board with some pictures of penguins.
How to PlayĬool Moves includes 40 different puzzle cards. So let’s take a look at how Cool Moves is played.
The only real differences between the games are the fact that the board in Cool Moves is smaller than Hi-Q and in Cool Moves a lot of the puzzles begin with more than one empty space on the board. I bring this up because the game Cool Moves plays very similar to those old games like Hi-Q and Solitaire. I usually ended up with two or three pegs left on the board at the end of the game. I remember enjoying the game despite never being able to clear all of the pegs. MathWorld-A Wolfram Web Resource.Have you ever played a game like Hi-Q where the object of the game is to systematically get rid of one peg at a time by having one piece jump over another? I remember playing Hi-Q when I was a young. Referenced on Wolfram|Alpha Peg Solitaire Cite this as: "Peg-Solitaire, String Rewriting Systems and Finite Automata." Proc.Ĩth Int. "One-Dimensional Peg Solitaire, and Duotaire." Working To Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation, 2nd ed. R. J. Nowakowski.) Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998. MSRI Workshop on Combinatorial Games, July, 1994 (Ed. "Unsolved Problems in Combinatorial Games." In Games Cambridge, MA: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Memo AIM-239, Unexpected Hanging and Other Mathematical Diversions. "A Programming and Problem Solving Seminar." Stanford University Technical Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, Vol. 2: Games in Particular. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press,ġ992. mathematica commands having Constant attribute.Bell gives necessary and sufficient conditions for this problem to be solvable Bell (2008) surveys this problem, which dates back to Smith Because of symmetry, only the first five pegs need be considered.Īlso because of symmetry, removing peg 2 is equivalent to removing peg 3 and flipping Lower row, etc., the following table gives possible ending holes for a single peg Hole 1 at the apex of the triangle and thereafter from left to right on the next There is also triangular variant with 15 holes (where 15 is the 5th triangular number ) and 14 pegs (Beeler 1972). Strategies and symmetriesĪre discussed by Gosper et al. All holes but the middle one are initially filled with pegs. One of the most common configurations is a cross-shaped board with 33 holes. The goal is to remove all pegs but one by jumping pegs from one side of an occupied peg hole to an empty space, removing the peg which was jumped over. A game played on a board of a given shape consisting of a number of holes of which all but one are initially filled with pegs.