Reaction Effect

One of the biggest "wins" when you play Conway's Game of Life is when you create an arrangement of cells that grows and changes, all by "itself," forever, or 2 minutes, which ever comes first. Designed as a virtual laboratory for exploring "cellular automata" (the gateway to nanotechnology), The Game of Life is a wonderful introduction to scientific tinkering. Wonderful, but, for someone who really just wants to play and be amazed, not so much fun. It takes time to discover the wonders of The Game of Life. It takes more time to realize how wonderful these wonders are. You can quote me on that.

Reaction Effect is a, well, Life-like game, but much more gamish, much more. Even the rules reflect its gamelike elegance: "The obective of the game is to get a chain reaction of tiles as long as possible. Tiles will start each other if their lines are connected. Click on a tile to start." Each tile is the same, a square inscribed with a quarter-circle arc. Clicking on a tile turns it 90-degrees clockwise, the implications of which becoming immediately apparent upon your first click.

Not to wax too educational-philosophically, but merely to point out how deep the challenge offered by such a simple, playworthy game, while perhaps noting that the score of 1433 you can just about see on the accompanying illustration was achieved in two clicks.

Reaction Effect is one of a collection of elegant little Flash games you can find on Games1.org,