Angry, Drunken Dwarves

About the game

Two dwarves, two wells and a rain of coloured gems. Pairs of gems fall from the top of each well, and you steer and rotate them as they come down. Stack gems of one colour into a rectangle and they merge into a crystal, which is worth far more points than the same gems apart. Then comes the nasty part: when you destroy gems on your side, counter gems fall onto the other dwarf's side, and the better your combos, the bigger the avalanche.

Less common pieces change the game. A break gem shatters every gem of its colour that touches the one it lands on. The rare diamond wipes out all gems of one colour on your side, counter gems included. Counter gems carry a number and turn into ordinary gems after a few turns, so a good chain can bury your opponent while theirs is still counting down. Every dwarf has his own drop pattern, a small picture of the shape his attacks take, and an attack strength that scales the damage: a tidy pattern is easy to dodge, a messy one is hard to plan against.

You can play Dwarf versus Dwarf with a friend on the same keyboard, or climb Arcade Mode against eight computer dwarves of growing skill. Play well and new things open up in the menus: an unlock screen, a mode against the robot at any difficulty, combat blocks with nasty special effects, and a single-player mode where you race the clock.

Playing it here

The first time you click Play the page downloads the Python runtime and the pygame library (about 23 MB), which takes a few seconds; after that a "click to start" message appears, and one more click starts the menu. The download is kept by your browser, so the other pygame games on the site open faster. Nothing is loaded from other sites. Your settings, high scores and unlocks are saved in this browser only. The "Quit Game" line of the menu simply starts it again, and full screen is left to the full-screen button of the page.

The game is made for a keyboard, and the second player shares it: player one has the left side of the keyboard (or the arrows), player two the right side.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Build rectangles, not piles. Gems only merge when they form a solid rectangle of one colour, so keep colours together and plan where the break gem will fall.

Chains win games. Breaking gems so that others fall and break in turn multiplies the attack. Crystals broken in a chain produce the biggest drops.

Answer an attack. Incoming counter gems can be cancelled by breaking gems yourself, but you have to break twice as many as are coming.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a one-player game? Arcade Mode is for one player against the computer; the timed single-player mode unlocks when you score high enough in the versus game.

Does it work on a phone? It needs a keyboard, so not really.

Is it free? Yes: the code, pictures, sounds and music are free software under the GPL version 2.

Credits and licence

Angry, Drunken Dwarves was made by Joe Wreschnig in 2004; the character designs are by Zach Welhouse, the portraits by Jessi Silver, the music by Brendan Becker and Ben Zeigler, and a few sound effects come from Armagetron (Manuel Moss), Pathological (John-Paul Gignac) and pygame (Pete Shinners). Everything is released under the GNU GPL version 2. This version is the one that Debian packages for Python 3 (their patches are included), with a few more changes to run in a browser (the complete source, the changes and the licence texts are linked from the Licenses page). The game runs on pygame-ce (LGPL-2.1) and CPython, whose licences and source are linked there too.