Wellington testers + Activities vs 8.2-759

[joe at jotaro.com]

Hi Martin,

> Well, I get a "3 block" puzzle. Perhaps I don't understand the rules
> completely, but clicking on the blocks didn't do anything interesting.
> Other testers suggested I tried the larger games / blocksets and with
> those I managed to get some implosions going, though I didn't manage
> to solve one.

The way the game works, you can only remove blocks if they are in a
contiguous group of size *three or more*.  There are other score-based
games (like SameGnome) that allow you to remove blocks in groups as small
as one or two, but Implode is intended to emphasize logic over
accumulation of score, and the three-piece rule leads to puzzles that are
more obviously solvable.  I've tried to make the game "discoverable" by
only highlighting the removable groups as the mouse cursor passes over
them.

There should always be a series of removals that clears the board.  It
sounds like you might have tried unsuccessfully to remove groups of one or
two on the easy level and didn't try removing a larger group.  Is this the
case?  If so, does the game perhaps need some sort of tutorial or hint
mode?

If you actually encountered a puzzle where it didn't let you click on
*any* blocks on the board right after the board was generated, that would
be a bug.  The easy puzzles should be easily solvable -- even random
clicking on blocks works for many of them.

Thanks,
-- Joe