Tantalizing tiles for the home and school Mac gamer...
Even though your first look at Tesserae™ by InLine Design may conger ho-hum responses, don't let that first impression mislead you. I had a similar response until I began learning the game for this review. This is not just another “flip-the-tiles” game.
Tesserae is a single player game based on Roman mosaics, where strategy and logic become major forces in play-value and success. The object of the game is to remove as many tiles with as few moves as possible. This is not nearly as simple as it sounds. The tiles are divided into three types and each has a score value. Tile spaces on the board may be occupied by one, two or three tiles and this is where the fun begins. As you stack the tiles, new tiles are created making the movement more difficult.
Play movement is very simple. Moving the cursor over a "potential" tile–move produces a cross cursor and reveals dots over possible (and legal) moves. The player simply clicks on the new location for the tile and the selected tile flips into that position, picking up the "between" tile on its way. In this fashion, tiles are eliminated until only one remains. This sounds easy, but just try it! After a marathon round with the tile board, the best we could achieve was level 2 with 7 tiles left on the board. There are nine different mosaics available to choose from, and a tournament version of the game is available where players are taken from one mosaic to the next. The player may also select the number of tiles - and the difficulty of the game. The documentation called the "advanced" level "for experts of masochists," and you better believe it!
Tesserae plays as well on monochrome monitors as in color, but color definitely makes it something special. The game will support any depth of color from 2 (B&W) to 256 colors. Our testing was done on SEs, and on the new Mac LC. (A very sweet machine, indeed!) We experienced no glitches or problems. The game is elegantly designed and implemented, so much so in fact, that you won't need documentation until you want to delve into the deeper strategies and scoring. Documentation is online and available at all times, as are sound, option and configuration menus. (See menu graphic.) Menu items are also accompanied by keyboard commands, attesting to InLine’s thorough programming. There's even a "Hide!" menu option that blanks the screen to a screen-saver mode when bosses or parents come snooping.
In testing the game, we played with seven, eight, and nine year olds as well as adults. All who played it were pleased. The younger folks had little or no interest in developing strategy and played the game for the sheer fun of flipping tiles to see who could get the most out. At the end of a round they were delighted to start again! Adults will usually and quickly become obsessed with winning. My only complaint is that no docs are included other than those online. Those folks who hunger for printed documentation (like myself) will need to go through a tedious process of screen captures in order to rebuild the docs for printing. Inline should at least include a "print documentation" option.
Needless to say, this game is uniquely intriguing and can be very addicitve. If you’re a Mac gamer with a taste for addicting brain teasers, Tesserae will give you a big bang for your buck.
Fred Showker
Tesserae™
Requires 800K drive, works on all Macs, not copy protected.
