Description

Rings Of The Magi is a puzzle game that I originally wrote back in the late MS-DOS days. It was subsequently ported to a 16-bit Windows 3.x version, and then entirely rewritten and greatly enhanced in 2000 as the current 32-bit Windows version entitled "Rings Of The Magi 2".

This page will eventually contain the various "add-ons" to the game that I've accumulated, but I haven't quite got it finished yet. Sorry, I'm working on it.

About The Game

Rings Of The Magi is a puzzle game where the object is to position rings of the same color next to each other, thereby eliminating them from the game board.

What sets it appart from many other matching puzzles is the mechanics of how the pieces themselves are moved -- they are not moved directly, but are "pushed" by various arrow buttons scattered throughout the board.

It's an easy game to learn, but difficult to master.

Where To Get The Game

The game is published by MVP Software and you may visit the game's homepage at http://www.ringsofthemagi.com or download the shareware version directly or order the full version online.

Secrets

There are two mini-games hidden within the game itself...

Mini Game #1: From the main menu screen, click on the little blue ball at the lower left of the central table.

Mini Game #2: From the board selection screen, click on a tiny bump in the rocky texture just above the "Edit" button.

(both mini-games are available in the shareware version also, but they have nag text superimposed)

Add-Ons

This area is still under construction. I'll post various add-on graphics and puzzles and what-nots as I get around to it.

Frames & Fields 8 misc pairs 1.8m Frames & Fields 8 wood pairs 2.0m

Rings thinner set 176k

Arrows Sci-Fi set 516k Arrows tan metal set 28k Arrows gold oak set 29k

Cursors tools set 60k Cursors sketch set 49k Cursors runes set 55k

Trivia

Over the years I've heard of several occassions where someone has tackled the game from a more academic standpoint. Here are a few, for anyone curious...

A master's thesis in computer science to study algorithmic solutions, by Hsin-Chuan Lai and Shun-Shii Lin of Taiwan Normal University. Abstract at the university's site, and a local copy of the Thesis in PDF format (unfortunately it's in Chinese, though the illustrations are recognizable). Here is the abstract of their thesis in English:

In this paper, we will use computers to design data structures as well as algorithms to derive the solutions for the game "Rings of the Magi". Since many initial configurations of this game need lots of steps to reach the final configurations, its game tree grows very rapidly. We could not search the entire game tree with the "brute force" approach. Previously, there are no computer solutions for this hard problem, but there are many manual trials that are found in many software documents. In this paper, we will explore some useful techniques for solving this game. The results show that we can get available solutions for most boards in a reasonable amount of time. We hope that this paper can introduce the interest of subsequent researchers.

Graham Mitchell of Leander High School once used ROTM as a project for his Computer Science students. The students were assigned the task of developing a "work-alike" that duplicated the game's mechanics as part of a lesson on two-dimensional array manipulation. The project may no longer be posted on his site but here is a saved fragment where it's mentioned.