Saturday, May 18, 2013

Mind The Gap

When someone sent round a link to Mind The Gap at work, work ceased for a short time. I would have told everyone to get back to work, but I was too busy playing it. 

The game starts off simply enough - there are three stations and you can connect them by dragging train lines between. Passengers appear at these stations in the form of different shapes, and their shape matches one of the stations. All you have to do is provide a network that's good enough to allow passengers to hop on the trains that move along the tracks to get to a station that's the same shape as they are. And the passengers are smart enough to hop on and off different trains to get to where they want to be.

Easy.

One of my rail networks, shortly before I become overwhelmed and made everything insane...

It is easy, at first, but each station can only have a total of 10 passengers waiting at it before it becomes overloaded and it's game over. Also, you only have five different train lines, so only 5 trains trundling around at any given time.

Just as I was getting really into the game Peter Curry, one of the game's co-creators, popped into the office and we (I mean me) all started throwing ideas at him about how it might be improved. Although we all conceded that all such ideas were incremental, considering the fact that the game is already brilliant in it's fiendish simplicity.

In conclusion, go play Mind the Gap, it might be the best game ever to come out of Wellington, and that's saying something because, for a little city, Wellington punches hard in the video games stakes.

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