Tabletop Dots and Boxes

Quick About Us
Hey TIG community! We're gametable.org and I thought it best to give a little background about us before discussing our latest game. We're a non-revenue, side-project game site created by a few friends honing their game development skills. We don't show any ads and don't have any intention to in the near future. Most of our games will likely be parallels of classic real world games or modernizations of simple old school computer games.

Tabletop Dots and Boxes
Now on to Tabletop Dots and Boxes- This was one of our favorite childhood games and its a classic pen and paper games that most folks know. When we learned that we'd all played it as kids, we figured it would be fun to take it digital. We kept the UI and SFX relatively simple, stealing the overall look-and-feel from our previous two games (I won't delve into those here). Check it out-

"dots and boxes title screen" title="dots and boxes title screen"

"dots and boxes title screen" title="dots and boxes title screen"

"dots and boxes game setup screen" title="dots and boxes game setup screen"

"dots and boxes gameplay" title="dots and boxes gameplay screen"

"dots and boxes scoring" title="dots and boxes scoring screen"

"dots and boxes resume game screen" title="dots and boxes resume game screen"

We're the first to admit that the graphics could use improvement... but given that none of us are artists, we're all pretty proud.

Current Features

Pass and play with friends or against the computer
Up to 4 players
4 computer difficulties to challenge
Different board sizes to choose from
A number of fun game board themes
Automatic game saves so you can come back anytime

Future Feature Wishlist

Online multiplayer support
Improved artwork and animations
Additional / Seasonal themes
Point based scoring that takes more into account than just boxes claimed
Interactive items / treasures on the game board

Technical Challenges & Feedback
TLDR; would you mind playing the game and letting us know if you think the AI is too easy / hard?
Building an intelligent, non-paranoid, real-time AI that could play well with up to 4 players was a real technical challenge. We ended up trying a number of game state solver algorithms before settling on Hypermax. After pushing it all out to a separate thread and then adding some intelligent move generation/ordering/culling rules we came up with something that works very well. It works almost too well. Tuning the AI down for lower levels of difficulty is proving tricky. We'd love some feedback about how the overall difficulty of the game feels, just drop it here as a reply.

Where to Find It
You can play Dots and Boxes online here