Let me start off by saying that I don’t know if this was an original concept on the platform on which I played it or whether it’s derivative of something else. Either way it was a cool and rather sedate little logic game. Here’s how it went:
You start with a supply of 4x4 blocks to place on a 50x50 grid. Each block consists of a pattern where one or more of the quadrants contains a colour, giving 10 usable combinations of any one colour, like this:
1: *
2: **
3: *
*
4: *
*
5: *
*
6: **
*
7: **
*
8: *
**
9: *
**
10: **
**
There were 3 colours in all. The stack of blocks consisted of every conceivable combination of pattern/colour with none repeating, thus giving you a stack of 10[sup]3[/sup] (1,000) blocks to place on the grid. The blocks were placed, sort of in Tetris fashion, on the board. They can be placed anywhere, but points were given based on how many of a given colour you can connect together. The larger the contiguous region of one colour you can create, the more points you score. The score was based on some algorithm that calculated how much to award you based on the size of each contiguous region you connect, so connecting two large contiguous regions of, say, yellow, scored exponentially more than connecting two small regions of same. Similarly, joining both segments of a block with 2 segments of yellow to a contiguous region of yellow scored higher than connecting only one of the segments.
It sounds a bit confusing but it was much simpler and self-evident in execution. I originally played this on my Atari ST back in the day. Anyone know what this game is called and if any variants exist?