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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

@sam: challenge accepted!

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