Friday Free Game: Boomshine Friday, January 18, 2008

Boomshine is one of those rare games that has stripped away everything unnecessary, leaving just the undistilled essence of gameplay intact. The field of play is filled with floating, multicolored dots. Your job is to click – just once! – and start a chain reaction that will touch as many of the dots as possible. Each level gives you more dots and asks you to clear a higher proportion of them. Those last four or five levels will take you several tries each to beat.

Level	Min	Total	Pct
1	1	5	20%
2	2	10	20%
3	3	15	20%
4	5	20	25%
5	7	25	28%
6	10	30	33%
7	15	35	43%
8	21	40	53%
9	27	45	60%
10	33	50	66%
11	44	55	80%
12	55	60	92%

It's a well-designed and addictive little game and you find yourself trying all sorts of different tactics. At first I clicked when I saw a cluster of dots, then I clicked towards the middle. Then I started trying to track the overall "flow" of them to see what was going to collide with what. The fact that I was performing these strange (futile?) mental acrobatics to track fifty random dots is a testament to this obviously well-tested game's achievement of near-perfect balance. Check it out.