Portugues
Spare Me
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About the game
Spare Me is bowling for people who would like to do some sums. The ten pins stand in a triangle, but each one carries a number. Under them are three balls, each showing a digit, with a small row of dots below that counts the digits it still has in store: the first ball has five, the second three and the third two. To bowl, you pick one, two or three pins, add the numbers on them and look at the last digit of the total. If a ball is showing that digit, you tap it, the pins you picked fall down and the ball moves on to its next digit.
Three pins that add up to 21, for example, call for a ball showing 1. Knock down all ten pins in your first try and it is a strike. Clear them over two tries and it is a spare. When you cannot, or do not want to, play another ball, press Next Ball: the pins you knocked down are your score for the try, and the same rack comes back for a second go; after the second try you get a fresh rack. It is real bowling arithmetic, with ten frames, the usual bonuses for strikes and spares and a score sheet taped up on the right, and a pencil that keeps the score for you.
The game has three difficulty levels. On Easy there are no rules besides the sums and you can pick any pins you like. Medium asks for pins that touch each other and for the front pins to go first, and Hard goes further and counts the pins removed by the last ball as well. The author took the idea from the card game Bowling Solitaire by Sid Sackson, and the graphics, from the wooden alley to the pencil and the neon title, are all made with CSS by the author. Frank Mitchell made it for js13kGames 2014, where the whole game had to fit in 13 KB, and designed it to run well on a phone.
Playing it here
Click Play and the game starts at once, with a short how-to on the page. Select the pins, then the ball. If you are stuck, press Next Ball to end the try. When the tenth frame is over you see the stats: strikes, spares, balls rolled and pins downed. The game saves its state in the browser, so you can close the page and come back to the game you were playing. The page is a tall column made for a phone, so on a computer it sits in the middle of the frame.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| click, tap a pin | pick it or put it back (one to three pins) |
| click, tap a ball | play it, if its digit is the last digit of the sum |
| Next Ball | end the try |
| New Game | start over after the last frame |
| Easy, Medium, Hard | choose the rules |
A few things worth knowing
Think in last digits. Only the last digit of a total counts, so 7 + 8 + 6 is the same as 1 as far as the balls go.
Mind the queues. The digits in each ball's queue are fixed for the rack, so work out which pins the next digits can take before you play the first one.
Easy first. The rules at the bottom of the page list what each level asks for, and Easy is the best level to learn the scoring.
Credits and licence
Spare Me was created by Frank Mitchell for js13kGames 2014 and is released under the MIT licence. This site serves the game with one small change: the two share buttons (GitHub and Twitter) were removed from the page, because their pictures are other companies' logos, and the credit links open in a new tab. The licence text is linked from this page, and the source is on GitHub.