Halma

The objective of Halma is to step or jump all your pieces across the board to the diagonally opposite corner in the fewest moves possible.

The name 'Halma' comes from the ancient Greek word for 'leap'. This is what you seek to do as the fastest way to cross the board. You can also step a square in any direction as a complete move. This is sometimes necessary if your piece has no neighbour to leap over. The board is 16 by 16 squares. Each player has 13 pieces. No pieces are lost or removed.

A player may jump his piece over a neighbouring piece of any color and in any direction that is directly across the neighbour. These leaps can chain together into one long move that can sometimes take a piece all the way across the board.

At startup, you are the Red player by default. Red always starts at the bottom-left corner. The turns are taken in a clockwise order. As each new round starts, the next player in clockwise order gets to make the first move.

Left-clicking a piece selects it for consideration. A white frame appears round the piece and any legal moves it could make are highlighted with little white squares. If you click another of your pieces, the first highlights vanish to be replaced by a new set. It is a good idea to click all your pieces in turn to see which ones can travel furthest. When you wish to make the move, click the highlighted target square. If you click a non-legal square, nothing will happen. If you click another player's piece, nothing will happen.

The obvious tactic is to select the longest leaps but you should also consider that other players will be using your pieces for their long leaps. It should be possible to be less helpful to your opponents by a careful choice of moves.

A round is ended only when all the pieces of all the players have successfully crossed the board. When a player finishes, he scores a point for every move that all the remaining players must make to finish. Scores accumulate as the game progresses.

A right-click displays the options. Another right-click returns you to the game.
There are options for each player's color displayed in two columns. The left column has three choices for each color which you select by left-clicking: "Not" for not playing, "Human" human player and "Machine" for computer player.

The right column switches help on or off for each color. They are all on by default. Computer players do not need help so none is provided for them.

When options are changed, the game and the scores are reset.

Requirements:

· OS: XP/Vista