Droids

Droids from 1982 belongs to the very beginnings of gaming on the IBM PC — and it is closer to a board game moved onto a screen than to a video game in the modern sense. One to four players share a single computer and take turns directing four mining robots across the surface of Mercury, competing over who hauls in the most minerals.

The rules fit into a few sentences. The board is a grid strewn with minerals. On your turn you pick one of the four shared droids and give it a direction; the robot then keeps going for as long as there is something ahead of it to collect, and everything it gathers counts as yours. Once all four droids are stuck with no move available, the game ends and the richest player wins.

Out of that simplicity grows a surprisingly mean little strategy game. Because the droids are shared, every move you make changes the situation for your opponents too — a good player does not merely collect but sabotages, steering robots into positions that leave the others nothing. It is kin to mathematical games like nim: foresight decides, not reflexes. A round is short, and the urge for a rematch arrives on its own.

Let us be honest: as a spectacle it is very poor. The 1982 graphics are purely functional, there is next to no sound, and the game only truly comes alive with living opponents around one keyboard. But as a curiosity from the era when people were still finding out whether the office IBM PC could play games at all, it has charm — and its core is sound, a clean ten-minute brain teaser.

Gather two or three people: it runs on oldgame.cz straight in the browser, no installation.