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Clickomania – what’s it all about?
What you need to know about this game when you are new to it.
Clickomania is a puzzle game. Some call it „reverse Tetris“ and it’s been named arcade like game, logical game or thinking game as well. Clickomania can be played strategically with a lot of mental effort, when you want to clean up the whole board. Or you can play very fast and intuitively, when you don’t want to do a lot of thinking. Either way, Clickomania has a great addicting power and after a little number of played games, you will notice that it’s getting harder and harder to quit: A frequent reaction is the need to play just one more game. And after that: Just another one. And then again, one little additional game…
The rules: Clickomania has quite simple rules: When you start the game, the board is filled with tiles (or so called stones). You are supposed to eliminate all these stones. You can remove stones only in groups: When a stone has a neighbor (above, below, on the left or on the right) with the same color, you can click on it and the stone disappears along with all the adjacent stones with the same color. The gap is filled by the stones above, which slide down. And if a column is completely emptied, the stones on the right slide to the left to close the gap.
That’s already all about rules. Just try it and soon you’ll realize how it works. The game is called Clickomania, because you can click on impulse. And if you don’t like your move, just take it back with the undo button.
Clickomania has been around since 1996; other implementations of the same game concept existed before. Since then, Clickomania has become a huge success. I can only guess how many people all around the world are playing the game. I estimate that it’s between three and five million people. In the meantime, there are versions for Macintosh, Linux, Java, Palm, DOS, Gameboy and even mobile phones. So far, there is no good implementation for Mac OS X: A challenge for a Mac programmer?