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Playing ... some important, brief, and humorous guidelines.

To the unintiated, the AtomGames interface may seem crude, quirky, and downright stupid. As they say at Budweiser, "True ... true." Both founders of AG are stupider than hell. But only one is crude (Hint, his name is Jim).

Anyway, the fact of the matter is that AtomGames isn't meant to be elegant or intelligent. Instead, we engineered it to look nice, to be simple, and most importantly to work in an HTML-enabled email program (such as MS Outlook). Basically, each AtomGame board is composed of many small graphic images. For example, the go game board looks like this




... but is actually composed of many copies of these three little images

.

You will notice that you can click on these images here in this static HTML environment, but you cannot paste them into this page. That's because this web page is hosted on our servers. Similarly, when you receive an AtomGame email in your in box, you WON'T be able to "play" the game there either. However, the geniuses at AG noticed that when you reply to an email, that the HTML-compatible email editors WILL allow you to edit the contents of the message, including all graphic images.

Hence, to play an AtomGame, a user simply needs to (1) hit reply then (2) use his or her crude copy and paste skills.

Copy a black stone image (CTRL-C), then paste it on the desired board space using CTRL-V ...




Of course, you will have to remember to erase the white stone you just killed, by pasting an empty space over the dead stone ...




When you're done editing the board, send it off to your opponent. Simple.

Important Issues:

  • We recommended turning off the "auto-indent" feature in your reply options. After about ten moves, the game gets so far indented that the graphics get jumbled.
  • System Requirements. AtomGames does not believe in quality. In short, that means we don't know which platforms this won't work on. It works fine on MS Outlook, but seems to have trouble with AOL, and Netscape mail. Web-based mail is a mixed bag, mainly because it always adds extra junk, so a back and forth game fills up with junk indents, headers, etc. very quickly. We actually hope this is all very frustrating for Apple users, but apologize to everyone else. Sorry. We will try to fix things after Jim gets his pilot's license.
  • Can you cheat? Sure. You could make two or three moves instead of one (if you're a low-life Euro-centric angry white alpha male, like my co-founder). If your opponent let's you, that is. The AtomGame itself doesn't police the game. Kind of like an old-fashioned chess board. It's just a piece of wood and some small stone pieces, people.
  • In all seriouesness, we hope you enjoy the AtomGames. We know they're quirky, but they're also free.

If you have any questions, please write me. Actually, in the many months since we launched this free hobby site (not free to us, but free to YOU), a lot of good folks have written in with thanks. News update to all those: Honey, the dissertation is complete! Thanks for all your kind thoughts. Now ... game on!

tim@timkane.com

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An AtomGame email will be sent to
your address for the first move.

Click to see actual size.