Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Multiplayer Sudoku

After playing Brain Age on the Nintendo DS for a while, I began to wonder why the folks at Nintendo didn't include a feature that allowed users to engage in multiplayer Sudoku matches.

Interested in the idea, I was Goggling the net when I came up with this website: Sudoku Combat, created by Marc Belmont using PHP and AJAX.

You can choose the appearance of your avatar, and then play alongside a random stranger or be given a URL which you can provide to one of your friends to play against them.You can also play alone… but that would kind of defeat the purpose of multiplayer wouldn’t it?

You have three difficulty levels to choose from, and matches can get pretty exciting even at the Easy level. As a little pressure tactic, to the right of your Sudoku grid, you can see how many completed squares your opponent has. A simple chat feature is also included.

Marc has done a great job at creating a clean, uncluttered interface to allow players to show the world how good they are at Sudoku.

One of the features I found that could get some improvement is the option to include multiple numbers on each cell. It is not as intuitive as the one found in Brain Age, as all numbers are to be written in a single line instead of, for example, having two independent lines (one for the guesses and one for the most likely answer).

Hope to see you sometime at Sudoku Combat, I usually go under the ‘wzdmjz’ moniker.

No comments: