How to Play

Take turns placing(double tap) pieces on the board. You can place a piece either on a blank space, or your spaces. When a stack reaches the CRITICAL MASS(glowing) it explodes and scatters the pieces in all directions. If any of these scattering pieces land on your opponent's pieces, they are OVERTHROWN and become yours.

Strategy

Unlike many board games, the state of play in Automaton Wars gets progressively less stable as the game proceeds. One school of thought holds that this means there are no good moves early in the game: so long as some of your pieces survive until the end game, they say, you've got as much chance as anybody else.

This may be true; however, even if there aren't good moves, there are definitely bad moves, and very definitely some good "structures" you can build yourself.

For instance, with a configuration like this, the blue player can blow up the red stack on the left, but the red player can't blow up the blue stacks on the right. The subcritical stack in the middle acts like a one-way firewall.

History

"I implemented the game as a port of a game called Explosion, written by someone called D A Hogg in some wonky kind of space-cadet BASIC for an ICL mainframe some considerable time ago. I don't know whether he invented it, or whether it was in Scientific American or what (If you do, please tell me). 

Even in version 1,  my "Automaton Wars" possessed many features which Explosion didn't - for example, graphics. Occasionally, other versions of the same concept pop up. Acorn User published one a while ago called Atoms. I don't reckon any of them is a tenth as cool as mine ;-)." -Peter Hartley

"I played this a bunch as a kid and when it broke, loosing compatibility with java and modern browsers, I vowed to revive it one day. I was going on a walk with a friend(Sean Day) and he said why not today, I wanna make a game tonight, and I love cellular automata!" -Dotails

Credits

D A Hogg - Explosion - for ICL mainframe

InteReS - Exploding Atoms - 1992 - DOS

Peter Hartley - Automation Wars - 6-22-1997

Sean Day - Overthrown - Programmer - 11-15-2022 - Godot

Dotails - Overthrown - Producer - 11-15-2022

Jam

Join the Gedanken Jam where you use your imagination to develop & play games like this.