Five-O is a board game I’ve been developing in my spare time over the last few years. It started as a side project during college. I was taking a course in artificial intelligence, and I wanted to create a game with an AI component. Growing up, I had played one of the many “Scrabble-but-with-numbers” games and had fond memories of it. Searching the internet revealed not a single good implementation of this idea for the computer, so that’s what I set out to make.

The basic rules are as follows. Players take turns placing intersecting sequences of numbers on a board. Each sequence must total to five or a multiple of five, and no sequences may be more than five tiles in length. For example, 7-3-8-7 would be a valid sequence because it adds up to 25. The sequence 3-9-5 is not valid because it adds up to 17 which is not a multiple of five. You can read more on the game’s webpage.

With the release of the iPad, I put the desktop version of Five-O on hold and started focusing on getting an iPad version done. The device is just too perfect for board games like Five-O. The October Challenge was the push I needed to finally finish version 1.0 and publish it in the App Store.

Tags: board game, Five-O, iPad

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 31st, 2010 at 7:48 pm and is filed under October Challenge 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.