Mac game maker Freeverse Software — known for their zany and offbeat card and arcade games, like Burning Monkey Solitaire and WingNuts — has released eight free board games for Mac users, complete with online gameplay.
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The games include 4 In A Row, a Connect Four-style game in which you must light up four buttons in a row before your opponent; 7th Fleet, a Battleship-style game where you destroy your opponent’s fleet; Chess; Draughts, or Checkers; Go, in which you surround your opponent’s pieces to win; Mancala, an African game of stones; Reversi, in which you flip your opponent’s pieces to dominate the board; and Tic Tac Toe, the classic three-in-a-row game.
Online gameplay in Freeverse’s new collection is handled by GameSmith, Freeverse’s own home grown online gaming system. GameSmith enables Internet-based players to seek each other out and play games online, and incorporates a ranking system as well. And Freeverse’s new board games also support “Emotidolls” technology, which enables you to convey emotions by clicking on the appropriate symbol (think emoticons, only a bit fancier).
Designed for Mac OS X, the final releases of these games will also support Rendezvous, the zero-configuration networking technology introduced by Apple with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar. That’s good, because all the games are network-only — there’s no single-player mode here.
Freeverse Board Games require 2 players with Mac OS 8.6 or higher, 12MB RAM, 16MB hard disk space, and a 333MHz or faster processor.