XTIC112, GAMES, X version of a simple but tricky board game RULES The board is made up of 4x4 squares and 16 pieces. The pieces carry 4 properties each, namely: o Black or brown o Horizontal or vertical o Solid or hollow o Round or square This makes a total of 16 possible pieces and there are exactly one piece of each type (so each piece can be represented by a binary number of length 4). Initially, the board is empty and it is successively filled with pieces. The game is over when a row, a column or a diagonal has four pieces carrying a common property in it, e.g. four black pieces. The player who places the fatal piece loses. The game is a two-player game, although in the current release, only the human-computer combination is supported. Player 1 (the human by default) chooses one of the 16 pieces. Player 2 (the computer by default) places this piece on one of the 16 squares of the board and chooses a piece out of the remaining 15 pieces which he gives to player 1, who places this piece on one of the remaining 15 squares on the board, etc. As mentioned above, the game is over when a player places a piece in such a way that a row, a column or a diagonal (but see below) contains four pieces carrying a common property. The player who places this piece loses. If there is no empty square left, we have a draw (yes, this can happen). AUTHOR Mattias Jonsson, Dept of Mathematics, Royal Institute of Technology, S-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden. email: mjo@math.kth.se, URL: http://www.math.kth.se/~mjo