Socrates is there, Socrates heads it in! Socrates has scored!

August 2, 2005 5:39 AM

Phutball (Rules, Java Applet), aka Philosophers' Football or ConwayGo is a deceptively simple 2-player game you can play on a Go board, or any rectangular grid. (It may be simple, but finding the right move is [PDF] NP Complete.)
posted by Wolfdog (7 comments total)

Sounds neat, but I can't seem to get the ball to jump...
posted by squidlarkin at 6:04 AM on August 2, 2005

And after I posted that, it started working correctly. Odd.
posted by squidlarkin at 6:06 AM on August 2, 2005

Wow. It's a tough game; near as I can tell, the top has the advantage of a tempo (like in chess) and basically can win as long as it doesn't try to push for an easily reversible gain.
posted by graymouser at 9:50 AM on August 2, 2005

Thanks to this post, I now know that [PDF] stands for [Pretty Damn Frustrating].
posted by buzzv at 1:00 PM on August 2, 2005

Buzzv, you can make it less frustrating by downloading a decent reader. All the Adobe versions later than Acrobat Reader 4.0 are horrible bloatware.
posted by flabdablet at 2:14 AM on August 4, 2005

OK, so I have a winning strategy for Level 1. Next...
posted by flabdablet at 4:49 AM on August 4, 2005

flabdablet -

Level 1 is too aggressive. This can be used against it if you simply patiently push topward, because it is inclined to jump only one philosopher. So, set up your philosophers so that you gain two each time it takes you back one. The higher levels are more complex, and I think the game would frankly be mostly interesting between human players.
posted by graymouser at 6:01 AM on August 5, 2005