StroQ

Name: StroQ
Author: Luc Vo Van
License: GNU Public License
Website: http://stroq.sourceforge.net/

I was recently going through the puzzle games projects at the sourceforge and come across StroQ. It is a nice Polarium clone. Actually, it is clone of only the puzzle mode. It has simple rules, a simple interface, and some good hard puzzles.



In StroQ, you make one continuous stroke (get it?) on the grid. Your path cannot loop, cross, or touch itself. Once you hit F5, all of the white or black squares covered by the path toggle colors. The border orange squares are not effected. After this toggling, a level is solved if each row, again not counting the border, is either all white or all black.

There are two parts to solving a level. First, you have to decide for each row whether it will be a white row or black row. Then you have to find the path which passes through each of the squares which have the wrong color. Often when trying to find the path, you get stuck and have to switch your target color for a row in your mind. This can open things up. Of course, it might cause problems else where.

StroQ comes with 125 levels. The levels can be played in any order. The first few levels are easy, but they quickly become difficult. This is an enjoyably challenging game. The length of the shortest successful path is recorded. It would be nice if there was a list of "best" or "par" scores available for an additional challenge.

As always, I have a few minor complaints about the interface. I wish there was a button to click on instead in having to hit F5. It is easy to extend your path from the end, but if you want to add a square on at the beginning, you have to start over. It would be nice if you could extend your current path from either end. Given that StroQ is an open source project, I shouldn't complain. I should download the source, fix these things myself, and recompile.