## JSweeper

Adding to my collection of clones of popular, well-known games, I created back in November of 2016 a Java-implementation of the all-time Windows classic game, Minesweeper.

Minesweeper was pre-installed on every installation of Windows up to and including Windows 7 and has been ported to a variety of different systems. Because of this, nearly everyone has at least once in their life played Minesweeper or at least heard of it.
In Minesweeper you are presented with a square grid of covered tiles containing either numbers or mines. Your task is it to uncover all tiles which are not mines in the least amount of time. When you uncover a mine, it explodes and the game is lost. To aid in figuring out which tiles are mines and which are not, every tile that is not a mine tells you how many mines are in the neighbouring eight tiles. Tiles which have no neighbouring mines are drawn gray and uncover neighbouring non-mine tiles once uncovered.
More on Minesweeper can be found in this Wikipedia article — I am linking to the German version, as the current English version has major flaws and lacks crucial information. If you are so inclined, feel free to fix the English Minesweeper Wikipedia article.

In my clone, there are three pre-defined difficulty levels, directly ported from the original Minesweeper game, and an option to freely adjust the board’s width and height as well as the number of bombs which will be placed. Gameplay is nearly identical to the original, as my clone also uses a square grid and the tile’s numbers correspond to the number of bombs in the eight tiles surrounding that tile.
The game has a purposefully chosen pixel-look using a self-made font to go along with the pixel-style.

#### Controls

• Arrow keys and enter to navigate the main menu
• Arrow keys or mouse movement to select tiles
• Space, enter or left-click to expose a tile
• ‘f’ or right-click to flag a tile
• ‘r’ to restart game when game is either won or lost
• F11 toggles fullscreen

To play the game, you can either download the .jar file or compile the source code for yourself. The source code is listed below and can be downloaded as a .java file.

``````// Java 1.6 / 1.8 code
// Jonathan Frech  5th of November, 2016
//         edited  7th of November, 2016
//         edited 11th of November, 2016
//         edited 13th of November, 2016
//         edited 14th of November, 2016
//         edited 15th of November, 2016
//         edited 17th of November, 2016
//         edited 19th of November, 2016
//         edited 19th of May     , 2017
//         edited 22nd of May     , 2017
//          * fixed max mine cap when
//            using custom settings``````

## T-3PO — Tic-Tac-Toe Played Optimally

Tic-Tac-Toe, noughts and crosses, Xs and Os, three in a row or whatever you want to call it may be the simplest perfect information game that is enjoyable by humans. Two players set their pieces (X or O) on an 3×3 grid, alternating their turns. The first player to get three of their pieces in a line, wins. If no player succeeds to get a line, the game ends in a draw.

Tic-Tac-Toe’s simplicity may become clear, if you consider that skilled players — people who have played a few rounds — can reliably achieve a draw, thereby playing perfectly. Two perfect players playing Tic-Tac-Toe will — whoever starts — always tie, so one may call the game virtually pointless, due to there practically never being a winner.
Because of its simple rules and short maximal number of turns (nine) it is also a game that can be solved by a computer using brute-force and trees.

The first Tic-Tac-Toe-playing program I wrote is a Python shell script. It lets you, the human player, make the first move and then calculates the best possible move for itself, leading to it never loosing. On its way it has a little chat whilst pretending to think about its next move. The Python source code can be seen below or downloaded here.

The second Tic-Tac-Toe-playing program I wrote uses the exact same method of optimizing its play, though it lets you decide who should begin and is entirely written in JavaScript. You can play against it by following this link.

Both programs look at the entire space of possible games based on the current board’s status, assumes you want to win and randomly picks between the moves that either lead to a win for the computer or to a draw. I did not include random mistakes to give the human player any chance of winning against the computer. Other Tic-Tac-Toe-playing computers, such as Google’s (just google the game), have this functionality.

``````# Python 2.7.7 Code
# Jonathan Frech, 31st of March 2017
#          edited  1st of April 2017``````

## 4096

4096 is a Java-based clone of the well-known web and mobile game 2048, which itself clones 1024 and is similiar to THREES. The naming trend is quite obvious, though note that $2^{12}$ is a power of two where the exponent is divisible by three, futher connecting to the aforementioned game.

In the game, you are faced with a 4×4 matrix, containing powers of two. By swiping in the four cardinal directions (e.g. pressing the arrow keys), you shove all the non-empty cells to that side. When two equal powers of two collide, they fuse together, adding. Once you shoved, an empty tile pseudo-randomly transforms to either a two-tile (90%) or a four-tile (10%).
Your objective at first is to reach the tile 4096, though the real goal is to achieve the highest score. Your score is the sum of all the collisions you managed to cause.

To play 4096, you can either download the .jar file or review and compile the game for yourself, using the source code listed below.

#### Controls

• Up, down, left or right arrow key shoves the tiles
• Escape restarts the game upon a loss
• F11 toggles fullscreen

``````// Java 1.8 Code
// Jonathan Frech,  5th of December 2016
//          edited  6th of December 2016
//          edited  7th of December 2016
//          edited  8th of December 2016
//          edited  9th of December 2016
//          edited 19th of February 2017
//          edited 24th of February 2017
//          edited 28th of February 2017
//          * gave the 4096 tile a color
//          edited 22nd of April    2017
//          * fixed window positioning by changing
//            frame.setLocationRelativeTo(null); to
//            frame.setLocationByPlatform(true);``````