Portugues
MarbleFish
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About the game
Chinese checkers is a race. Each side has ten marbles in one corner of a star-shaped board and the goal is to get all of them across to the opposite corner before the other side does. A marble can move in two ways: one step into a hole next to it, or a hop over a marble (yours or the enemy's) into the empty hole behind it. The trick, and most of the fun, is that hops can be chained: if after landing there is another marble to jump, you keep going, and a well-built ladder of marbles can send a piece across half the board in a single turn.
The computer opponent is MarbleFish, a program by arthur-x that searches the possible sequences of moves a few turns ahead, with an alpha-beta search running in a separate thread of the page so that it never freezes the screen. There are three difficulty settings, drawn as an ice cream, a dumbbell and a skull, according to how many moves it looks ahead. The little face between the buttons shows what the program thinks of the position: a grin when it is winning and a sick look when it is losing badly.
The whole interface has no words at all, only icons, which is very much in the spirit of the game. The board is drawn with plain page elements and fits any window.
Playing it here
Click Play. You are the pink marbles at the bottom and the computer moves the orange ones at the top. Click one of your marbles and the holes it can reach are highlighted; click a hole to move there, and if you landed after a hop, the next hops appear too, so you can chain them. When the move is ready, press the tick on the right to confirm it. Pressing the cross takes the unconfirmed move back. The computer replies after a short pause. Press the ice cream, dumbbell or skull button at the top left to change how strong the computer is; it only works before the first move, and the circular arrow at the bottom left starts again. Nothing is saved between visits.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| click one of your marbles | select it and show where it can go |
| click a highlighted hole | step or hop there, then keep hopping if you can |
| tick (right) | confirm the move |
| cross (left) | take back the move you have not confirmed |
| ice cream / dumbbell / skull button | change the computer's strength (before the first move) |
| circular arrow | start a new game |
A few things worth knowing
Build ladders. Marbles standing at gaps of one hole are bridges for long hops, so keep your marbles together, near the middle of the board.
Do not leave stragglers. The last marbles to cross decide the game, and the computer will happily use your bridges against you.
Block the centre. A well-placed marble can stop a long chain of hops by the computer.
Credits and licence
MarbleFish was created by arthur-x and is released under the MIT licence; the licence text is linked from this page. This version has been changed by FredyGames: the icons that came from Google's Material Symbols font were redrawn as small SVG pictures, so that the game does not load anything from another site.