Your Darworm has never seen this grid cell pattern before.
Dismiss this dialog, then choose a direction to go in
Your Darworm will remember this choice each time it sees this pattern.
Darworms are creatures that crawl about on a hex grid eating the grid lines. Darworms leave a grid point by eating one of the six grid lines exiting the point. If all six grid lines are eaten there is no way out and the Darworm starves to death. Darworms each contain a program instructing it which direction to go for each of the 64 possible grid hexes it can encounter. There 64 possible patterns of which lines are eaten and which are not in a grid hex it can encounter. You train, or program, your Darworm by playing games. Each time your Darworm sees a new pattern of grid lines, a previously unseenn hex cell, it stops and asks you which direction to go. It remembers this and adds it to its program. The next time it sees the same pattern of grid lines it will go in that same direction again without stopping to ask you which way to go. Soon your Darworm will take off on its own. It may take several games to completely train (program) your Darworm.
The Darworm that eats the sixth and last spoke in any grid point captures that grid point. You get one point for each grid point you capture. "The fact that you can rip off some other worm's territory just by being the last one to lay a trail in it gives Worms? all the strategic fascination of ancient, classic games like Go and Chess" William Michael Brown's game review from William Michael Brown's review in Electronic Fun with Computers and Games, September 1983
You can generate a Darworm with a preset randomly chosen program or train a new Darworm yourself. You can play the same Darworm in successive games.
The initial setup pits you against a Darworm that has been randomly pre-programmed in advance which direction to go given the pattern of its current grid cell. Your Darwin initially has no training. It doesn't know which way to go for any grid cell pattern. So it asks you which direction to go every time it sees a grid pattern it hasn't seen before. Eventually your Darworm will be able to move on its own using the training you have given it. When a game ends the default it to use the "SAME" Darworm for the next game, that is to use the existing training and add new training as new configurations are seen in each new game.
Or you can just set all four Darworms on "RANDOM" and watch and hear a game play that in all probability no one else has ever seen nor heard. There is also a screensaver mode which continuously plays random games. Screen saver mode lets you choose the number of players, the game speed, and the musical instrument for each player
On the Settings Page you can control many parameters of the game such as grid size, and the default Darworm speed.
Pushing one of the four large color buttons brings up page to select the type of Darworm (None, Random, Same, or New) as well as additional attributes for the Darworm including the instrument sample to use and the musical scale associated with the six different notes a darworm can produce based on the six different directions a darworm can move.
Based on the 1983 Electron Arts Game Worms? By David S. Maynard
A 6 minute video introduction on how to play Darworms YouTube Introduction
Inspired by Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column Fantastic patterns traced by programmed "worms" in the November 1973 issue of Scientific American Paterson's worms
Darworms version 0.9.0
Unknown
MIT License
Copyright (c) 2012-2018 David S. Maynard
Credits and Unusually Helpful References:
Instrument samples courtsy of Free Wave Samples
Web Audio Tutorials Middle Ear Media
HTML5 Games by Jacob Seidelin amazon
Understanding ES6 by Nicholas C. Zakas leanpub
Web Storage, React, Gatsby Tutorials Tania Rascia's blog
You can email a link to the game to a friend. You friend will be able to get a replay of the last game you played by simply clicking on the link. This will use your own local email client program. You will be able to review the email before you send it. This program does not and will not ever have any access to your email or to your contacts.