Best Excel Game or Diversion

The October 2002 Challenge is to create a game or diversion in Excel. Create something that will be interesting enough to cause other people to waste their valuable time playing the game. The game can include VBA or be in straight Excel. You can recreate an existing game (I think my first program ever was a simulation of the dice game "craps"), or invent a totally new game.

Send a copy of your game to challenge@MrExcel.com and I will post it in a download section of the site so that others may try it out. The sub-challenge is to whoever amasses the highest score in the game which is chosen as the best diversion.

We'll let this challenge run until November 15th, 2002. The winner will receive the incredibly useful Message Board CD.

Results

Wow! Here we go - 18 entries submitted by the deadline, a screen shot, and a link to the download. I have virus scanned each entry using Norton before uploading it. However, I have NOT examined every bit of code to make sure they are safe. Use these at your own risk. If one blows up your PC, please walk to a neighbor's PC and post in the lounge so that no one else has the same fate.

Vote for your favorite. I asked judges on three continents to vote for their top 3. Here are the finalists. Vote for your favorite among these.

• Entry 1

  Drive by Sean O'Sullivan

  Sean says: "This one is similar to those old fashioned ZX81 games (an old UK Computer that was about 5 years before the PC was invented!!!) My game is still a little un-refined as its basically 2 lunch times and tonight finishing off..."

  

• Entry 2

  Memory by Chris Leonard

  Nice version of the children's memory game. Double click 2 squares to reveal the colored tiles underneath. The goal is to identify all matching pairs.

  

• Entry 3

  3D Tic Tac Toe by Tim aka Bolo

  Wow - cool version of 3D tic tac toe. The computer oponent is smart. Nice game! I can tell it will be tough to come up with a single winner this month. LOL! what an evil oponent - it just got me "two ways", and all of the control tip texts change to "Ha ha! Got you!" forecasting my impending doom.

  

• Entry 4

  Screen Soother by Matt Naumann

  A screen soother. Best viewed in 1028 x 768, the screen soother features colors that rapidly change in stunning patterns.

  

• Entry 5

  Life by Jerry Hunter

  A nice Excel version of the classic Life simulation. Comes with a number of pre-programmed start points or draw your own.

  

• Entry 6

  FootyLeague by Russel Piper through Ivan Moala

  FootyLeague by Jonathan Davies

  Fantasy Soccer League (for our U.S. readers) or Football League (for everywhere else). Select which team you wish to own and run a simulation of the season. Jonathan Davies wrote the original simulation a few years ago. He shared it with a few mates and it was passed on to many people. There were bugs in the original version which became widespread. We offer two versions here, one last enhanced by Russel Piper, and the latest directly from Jonathan Davies with all of his latest bug fixes.

  

• Entry 7

  Magic 8 Ball by Rich Needham

  Rich says: "Here's my MagicEightBall program, more diversion than game. It's a fairly simple program using a random function to select from 60 different answers. Just ask a question which can be answered by "yes" or "no" and click around the MagicEightBall in the window to get your answer. Click again to reset the window. Click the small "X" button in the MagicEightBall window to exit the program. Just for fun, try grabbing the MagicEightBall window by the titlebar and dragging it around the screen to see a cool effect.

  

• Entry 8

  Hangman by Joseph Cognard

  Hangman. See, I am about to get hung in this initial game....

  

• Entry 9

  Snakes & Ladders by Bob LaLonde

  Nice game - visually appealing. Great for the kids. Bob says: "Snakes & Ladders. You can play with 2 players or Autoplay. I made this to amuse my son one rainy day, when the internet was slow.

  

• Entry 10

  Tic Tac Toe 4x4 by Barry Tocher

  Barry says: "Click on box that you want to put your x or o, Then click on the x player or o player button. To restart the game click on the start button" Bill says: I can't get this to work in XP - the color schemes must be different.

  

• Entry 11

  Snake by Jochen Wriske

  Wow! I couldn't put this one down. The classic snake game. You need to maneuver an ever-growing snake around the grid, trying to each the black squares and not running into yourself. As the snake lengthens and the speed increases, this becomes increasingly challenging.

  

• Entry 12

  Master Mind by David Tate

  David notes that this game requires RANDBETWEEN, so you have to have the analysis tool pack turned on. Nice implementation of the Master Mind peg game. The computer selects a random sequence of numbered pegs. You try to guess the number and sequence of the pegs and in response the computer tells you how many you have in the right sequence and how many you've selected the correct peg number but it is in the wrong sequence.

  

• Entry 13

  Color Game by Ioannis Tsiamadanis

  Ioannis writes: This is like the Rubic cube but not 3D, just 2D, the game is like the bonus stage in an old coin op game 15 years ago but I cant remember its name.

  The goal is to make the colors match the target. First, left-click a square outside of the color tiles to get the right arrow to appear. Then right-click the arrow to rotate the squares in that row, column, or diagonal. The first color become the last, the second become the first and the last become second (to the direction you right click). Beat the clock - you have 1.30 minutes to solve every Board. If you take longer than that, you get no points.

  

• Entry 14

  Tiles Game by Ioannis Tsiamadanis

  Ioannis writes: The second one it looks like Tetris but it is not Tetris. It uses the Tiles like Tetris. The idea is to put Tiles together to make "floor" with specific dimensions such as 3x5, 3x20, 4x15. Every "floor" is a Level in the game, if you solve one Level (level 1 is 3x5) then you go to the next Level (unless you want to find another solution to win extra points) .. and so on .. until you go to the last Level, which is 6x15. The points-score for each level is equal to its dimensions, 3x5=15 points, 4x10=40 points and so on. The Tiles are 12, Every tile has 5 square cells. The Levels which the Area of Floor is equal to 60 are the most difficult, because you must use all the tiles in a specific order and "shape" (Every tile have mirrors or rotated shapes relative to its self).

  

• Entry 15

  Knights Game by Andy Pope

  This is a solitaire game where the object is to move all of the BLUE marbles from ABOVE the line to BELOW the line and all of the RED marbles from BELOW the line to ABOVE, using a single space to move. Double click any marble to move it to the empty space. Each marble moves the same way as a knight in a game of chess - 2 spaces either horizontally or vertically, and then 1 space vertically or horizontally - forming an L.

  

• Entry 16

  ExcellonII by Koichi Tani, translated by Colo

  This is an impressive shooting game. Move the rocket with your arrow keys and fire at incoming targets. Hit the powerups for more power. This definitely gets the award for looking the least like Excel!

  

• Entry 17

  3D Tic Tac Toe by Steve W (White6174)

  Play against the computer in a 3x3x3 Tic Tac Toe board.

  

• Entry 18

  Snake by Colo

  Colo's Snake game. This looks impressive, but something is causing it to GPF on my XL2002 machine.