Cubix

Many years ago I used to play a pencil and paper game at school. The game started with a number of points being marked out to form a grid, players then took turns drawing lines to join two dots and whoever completed a square won that square and got another turn. Cubix takes that old game and makes it a 3-D game.

There were various iterations of the game, Cubix: The Wall, Cubix: Squared, Cubix: Cubed and Cubix: Tetrix which were eventually combined into a single game:* Cubix: Squared. This is the original game, it's played using a 2x2x2 cube which gives 54 lines per game, 36 squares in Nubix and Twobix modes and 8 cubes in Cubix mode.

Cubix: Cubed. As above but the cube is 3x3x3

• Cubix: The Wall. There are six levels/shapes in this game which uses a 3x3x1 format giving 64 lines per game, 42 squares in Nubix and Twobix modes and 9 cubes in Cubix mode.

• Cubix: Tertix. This is a special version of Cubix that uses triangles inside a tetrahedron rather than squares in a 3D-grid

There are three game modes; Nubix, Twobix and Cubix:* Nubix Mode: Here players take turns connecting two points, if the player completes a square - one face of a cube - they get another turn. Completing squares scores points, the player with the most points wins.

• Twobix Mode: As with Nubix the players take turns completing aquares but the player only scores points for squares where all sides are their colour

• Cubix Mode: There are two modes of play, Lines Where players compete to make cubes one line at a time, and Sides where a player completes an entire cube face in their turn.

The game was released via BBSs and quickly became popular as an internet game on AOL partly because it is possible to run several games concurrently while chatting via IRC etc.