with qetuth, harryck, caren, sam, nymike and myself there are now 6 active mm players around. maybe this motivates some of the mm veterans to come out of retirement?

we should talk more about mm, nono and ms. ;)

How do I solve 2x2 square mallet?  I spent awful lot of time with no success on that mallet.  So far in the tournaments I havent been competitive, I'd like to finish one tournament not in the last place.

mallet 1 on hard (square 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S8vP-vjzrU

mallet 2 on hard (+)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nKUZw6Mwr0

nice to see a thread started to talk about malletmania

Early this morning I got a 1 second on easy mode staircase board by just spam clicking both the right and left button on my mouse for 20 minutes lol. I actually just wanted the 2 seconds game then I did 2.36 and thought perhaps 1 was possible.

I had the same problem with that board Mike, I spent hours for trying but could never solve the hard mode. I never thought to try the strategy like Fritz used, that video will surely help me. i was just solving the easy corners then guessing the rest. maybe i'll finally solve a board tonight. :o

Mid-season 34, I was devoting about a minute a week to the MM tourneys, and decided to play out the season and then stop posting. Then all of a sudden right as I went to stop playing everyone joined in! It's good to see it going again.

I wrote a long post with some hints and tactics for using square mallets, even pointing to EWQs video for examples. But then it didn't post correctly and I lost it.

So I thought I'd post a link to this old video:

http://members.iinet.net.au/~queteq/MM/QQ-M2h-90s-130307.zip

This completing of 2h uses no guesses, and in fact 2h can usually be solved without guessing.

And Harryck - nice time! I think Gero was trying for 1s on Ve board years ago, but never got it. I've actually only gotten a few 2s in lots of trying.

Haha the reason for the increased popularity of mm is I recruited Sam to play nono from minesweeper community and Sam decided to buy full version of mm after that I got one too and fritz followed, meanwhile harryck and caren resumed playing, finally christoph joined last week we might have more than 8 players soon, in my opinion its the hardest puzzle game I played.

97 on 2h :D

Qetuth, I watched your video.  I can follow the moves until the 1 minute mark.  Then when you start working on the middle I get confused.  I understand the edges, reducing everything to the same number, usually 1.  Then when you get a 1-2-1 you can clear and get a new corner.  I don't understand the second row in, should they be 3's or 2's or just the same number?  How do the corners work? 

The big tournament boards with 2x3 or H's I hardly ever finish the board, maybe 1 out of 40, probably less.  I think I just end up making random guesses.

Haha, nice to see some people finally playing this game  :)
Perhaps it will motivate me to try improving, too.

Funny to see Qetuth's video again, I think he made it for me some time ago, because I wasn't able to finish 2h.

About the scene at 1:00 min. You have
4  6
[] 4
there. The difference between 4 and 6 is 2, so you can hammer it down to
2  4
[] 2
because you will always have to hammer at least 2 times with the mallet covering this pattern.
Try thinking about what happens if you hammer 4 6 without covering [] 4. You'll get (because further clicking leads to an unsolvable pattern):
2  4 Unsolvable pattern with further clicking: 1  3 and    2
[] 4                                                           [] 4       [] 4
This pattern automatically needs to be hammered 2x with the mallet covering it completely.
Now try the other possibility: Hammering
6            4
4 without [] and you'll get (stopping before pattern gets unsolvable):
4  4
[] 2
And again this pattern needs to be hammered at least 2 times with the mallet covering it completly.
So all in all you can see, either way you have to reduce
4  6     2  4
[] 4 to [] 2
and still you have all possibilities left for solving this pattern completly.

Hope you could understand my english and the explanation  :D

Gero, thank you for explaining.  I can follow what you say, but don't know how to apply it more generally.

What if it was:
4  7
[] 5

would I always be able to make it:
4  6
[] 4

then:
2  4
[] 2

Can the corners always be reduced to:
x  x+y
[] y

So if I have
2  6
[] 3

I could reduce it to
2  5
[] 3

Can I also make it so x and y are the same?  Can it always become:
2  4
[] 2

Does:
x  x+y
[] y

become:
x  2x
[] x

caren, if x < y then yes.

thanks for the explanation gero and caren.

If you have a corner with any numbers:
x  a
[] y
then x and y can be made the same: so if x<y you could go to:
x  b
[] x

Now as Caren said, if b>2x, it can be reduced to 2x. However, if b<2x, you can hit the whole corner until b=2x
If you're lucky enough to have b=x, then the whole thing can be cleared.

Now, the internal smoothing:
Lets say my top 2 rows of board looks like:
[]2222[]
[]3344[]
I could smooth this to:
[]2222[]
[]3333[]
Once an edge is smooth, you can then smooth the next row in, then the next row, and so on. This is because, however you clear that row of 2s, it's going to make the next row in a new edge with -2 to every square. But you only smooth each row along itself, you don't get to reduce every row to the same number unless you can smooth from two different edges (ie, the top and the side).

[]22[]22[]
[]334 55
[]334 44
Here, the smoothing is interrupted (ignore the corners, I'm assuming we can't attack from the sides here for demo)

[]11[]11[]
[]111 11
[]223 44
Think about what happens when the 1s are cleared - there are 2 ways to clear them, but either way makes the 3rd row a new edge as is, so it can be smoothed despite the extra first row []!

We couldn't do this the previous time because the 4 in the 2nd row makes it unclear what the 2nd row will look like, so we can't attack the third row.

Hope that made sense.


The most common games I play with MM these days are:
a) mallet 8, custom board, 20x15 with 0 hidden, change the number of hits needed up 1 when you win, down one when you lose. Current score is 151.

b) 2x2 hard, try to reach 70% cleared without reducing any square to 0 (except those that start 0). So basically try and get a board of pure 1s with occasional 2 or 3.

c) + hard, try to get entire board showing only even numbers, with rule that you cannot hit in same location twice.

But more commonly I play insanely huge custom boards from simon tathams puzzle collection. Or Diablo 2.

I really like this week's tournament. Your move, Fritz & Qetuth.  ;D

@sam: challenge accepted! :P

EDIt: took me roughly 45min to get a 30. ::)

Bleh, up to 32x3. I'll get a sub 30 sometime later, done for tonight..

Come at me!  :D

Somehow I managed to get the exact same score on two different computers without realizing entering my account code wasn't enough to upload it as me...  :o

Any way I can get the other one deleted?

I have used different machines before - this should have worked fine. Notice that the links are to user 320 and 321 respectively. So it's definitely two different accounts.

I'll email Yariv about it, see what he says is going on.

Sam I would copy the Mallet Mania directory from your regular machine to the other.  I think your info is in Mallet.ini.  I have it on multiple machines too.

I'm probably not using that computer in the future, I just wanted to try out the tournament and didn't have access to my usual computer.

On a different note, does anyone have any tips for mallet 10 on hard? It's the only one I haven't solved yet.

Same here, Sam, I've come close to solving it but my times are always horrible... like 250 seconds. :|

sam, harryck: keep left thumb on backspace and another finger of f2 ;)

i don't have much of a strategy on @h, only use a lot of undo.

just finished my 2nd sub100 on @h...it's really not that hard once you've beaten it a couple of times

wtf harryck

I can do the current board really fast if I cheat.  I finished in 28.10 which is much faster than my 48.14 time.  I just used IntelliPoint and assigned a macro to the left button to click 5 times.  I wont upload the time.  It is fun to sweep along the side clearing fast.

Teek used to have a really fast method for this board that let him consistently go well under 40s, he stood up and used two hands on the mouse and clicked with one hand while the other moved it. I never really got it to work as well for me, but I have a different mouse now, so I might give it a try.

I didn't think anyone would ever beat his times on this board (best was 33) so grats Harryck.

That's pretty much my strategy,  although I used a touchpad for this board, I keep 1 of my left hand fingers on the click button and just glide down the sides with my right hand, I can click like 16 times per second like this :p

i thought about switching mouse buttons for this board and using the right hand to move the mouse and the left hand (pointing and middle finger) to click. however any advantage in cl/s speed was taken away by lack of mouse control and i was 5-10s slower that way.

btw: i just did 2 40s runs (only clicks, no mouse movement):
5.85 cl/s with left button and right pointing finger
9.25 cl/s with right button  and left pointing and middle finger.

I tried the the current board and it uploaded to an old tournament that ended 2011-04-07.  My tournament info says ends 2011-06-30.

I wrote to Yariv to see if he can fix this.

It's fixed now.  I had to reload the tournament to clear my fastest time.

managed 9s on Am a few days ago :), might try for a sub30 on Ah in the future

9?!? :o Oh, that's what I call Vm. Great time! (Although 9s on what I call Am would really have scared me, considering the current record is 15s!)

I definitely think sub 30 on Vh is theoretically possible - I have dozens of sub-34s, and I'm not the fastest clicker around. Only a single 31 though, and only a single 9s on Vm despite hundreds of 10s.

33->31 on Vh, also got a 2nd 9 on Vm :P

got a 3rd and 9th 9, then 8.48!!! :D

66*2->63.98 on +h

new wr :D

Congratulations.

Catching up quickly on the rankings, too!

last week's mallet mania tournament was my 47th win in row which means i'm tied with qetuth for longest winning streak of individual tournament board. longest winning streak in terms of seasons will take at least 91 more weeks. can you believe qetuth won 19 season without interruption?

After about 2 years of playing on and off I became the 15th and possibly the last ever player to solve all the mallets.

I just bought a new desktop with win 8 and mm does not work.  I downloaded setup file, but it won't run on win 8.  Any of you have ideas how to configure it?