And so, the Quest begins.

I've added "Laps" to Mancala in the ShoeBox, but ... crikey, is it hard to keep track of! AL is utterly baffled by this new style of play, so don't expect him to be a great challenge. If I can find a good method of play, I'll work that into AL's brain, but for the minute, he's a bit dumb in this mode. .. To be fair, so am I, and the Laps mode ends up being a game of Pot Luck! You can Play Mancala in the Shoebox, in the "One on One" section. The Laps setting is in the Rules.

I should really finish off Mancala's "Laps" stuff. I think that's probably going to be today's task. But after that, what game comes next?

A smallish, but needed improvement to ALs Mancala abilities. Players of v0.9858 should find that ALs a little bit smarter, targeting your possible captures, as well as aiming for his Mancala pot a little better. It's not "much" of a change, but he is a bit harder. I've not yet added Laps into the mix! Maybe tomorrow?

Crikey, RSKGames has already sent his Player Thoughts.. Guess I'd better hurry up and get those last few tweaks in place..

@RSKGames

I have never played this game before so it was fresh and fun for me. After 2 defeats and some reading of the rules I got the hang of it and was able to beat the AI few times.

Mancala is now in the Shoebox! You can Play Mancala in the "One On One" section of the Shoebox.

Spent a couple of hours, late last night, trying to find the best rules to give AL when playing Mancala.

Mancala's coming along nicely, now. I think!! All the Landing rules seem to be working, and the game-end stuff is also functional, but AL's still not very good at the game, so a little more work on AL is needed. But, definitely getting there! *phew*

The seeds (gems in this case) of Mancala are now managing to complete a full circle!

I might need to do some extra work on the menus.

I asked @CraigGrannell last night if the "swoopy" menus were a bit too much for his motion sickness issues, and he replied that it was.. For me, a bit, yeah. I thought as much when I added those Tap Swoopy things, but it's good to get a little confirmation.

A simple crossword clone, with a slightly different scoring mechanism. You can Play Crossword Golf in the Shoebox, next to the standard Crosswords game, in the Word games!

Alan Suggests..

While I'm thinking about it, one nice-to-have feature for Crossword Game would be ''shuffle my rack''. Sure, ok, why not!

Not really a game, but if I'm going to make this collection, you just know that this has to go in. You can Find Score My Words in the Shoebox, in the Extras section.

I've sorted out RSKGames' menu scrolling issue.. .. I think.. But obviously will depend on many "browsers aren't exact" issues. Be sure to let me know if it's ok for you.

RSKGames says..

The animation of the icons on transition from main menu to sub menu and back looks cool. Except the board games sub menu in all other sub menus the first row icons are way over the top such that half the icon is hidden above. Took me a while to figure out exactly what he meant, as the exact number of onscreen icons relies on all sorts of screen resolution gubbins.. .. But..

A couple of tweaks to the engine before I move on into other Crossword based things. 1. I've finally got the "Score value bubble" looking a little more like a bubble, and showing up at the end of words instead of seemingly at random! 2. Tap to Play "should" now work, but is still a small threshold of "tap". I might have to add the threshold into the option screen.. .. If I ever bother to make an option screen!!

There are now tabs along the bottom of the menu, when you're selecting a game, to let you quickly switch between the various sections of the site. The icons are reused as tabs, and are drawn with their bottoms chopped off, so they look better on the screen, and don't take up a giant chunk from the bottom of the menu. For the most-part, I've tried to make this part of the code easily tweakable, so that in future I can add extra sections. However, it might get a bit cramped if I do that...

I've shrunk the overall width of the menu buttons on Shoebox. For now, this means there's a little more space in the menu, to fit more games onscreen at once. Maybe later I'll try to add little tabs along the bottom, but .. for now.. SleepyJay is taking over!! Be sure to let me know what you think of the slightly modified buttons. Better, Worse or .. Kinda the same, Jay, you wasted hours doing naff all!!

I'm still not sure on the best layout for the frontend of the Shoebox. I do like the circular bubbly thing, but there seems to already be way too much scrolling with only 5 games in a section. Give me a year of working with this framework, and there'll be a lot more than 5! (Hopefully!) So, the frontend definitely needs a rethink, but I'm not really sure what kind of layout WOULD work for it all.

Record time for player feedback! Let's have a nosey. You can Play Shuffled Tracks in the Extras section of the Shoebox.

RSKGames

Played ''Shuffled Tracks'' and was quite surprised to find such a polished game done in 2 days. You'd be surprised.. ... The game was almost ready to go, yesterday!! Most of today's coding session was spent fixing up the generator to make the levels more difficult.

A simple enough little sliding-block puzzle game, with a train! You can Play Shuffled Tracks in the Extras Section of the Shoebox.

I've a couple of planned games to do that shouldn't take too long at all.