Hopickston is the latest casual puzzle game from Tonypa, and like so many of his other games, it offers a uniquely original experience that is both simple and elegant.

Move by clicking one of the available hollow blue stars with your mouse. Your goal is to clear all of the stones from the board by moving your blue star around, traversing all of the spaces at least once. You can move a fixed number of spaces in any direction (horizontally or vertically), so long as you don't move off the edge of the board, or land on one of your gray spaces (more on that later). The three numbers above the board tell you your current move (at the left) and the next two moves in the queue, all ranging from 1 to 4 (or 5, in some later rounds).

As you move around the board, you will leave a trail of darkened stars over spaces you've landed on or passed over. While they serve as nice markers of where you don't have to hit again, they actually add to the challenge of this puzzle. You can jump over darkened stars, but you can't land on them. If you get yourself in a situation where you can't make any moves at all without landing on a dark star or going off the edge, the darkened stars will start to remove themselves from the board in the order they were laid down, until the first legal move is available. However, this convenience has a price. Every time a dark star is removed from the board, your number of remaining "moves" is reduced by one. If you run out of moves, the game is over. If you can clear the board of all stones, those extra moves are converted into a score bonus, so try not to waste too many moves.

Analysis: What Tonypa seems to have done here is create a game that has that perfect balance between strategy, luck, logic, and memory. Even if you accidentally leave yourself with a couple of moves left with more stones to collect still, it's possible to come back and win the level with the right moves. It might help to remember what path you took around the board, so you can minimize the number of moves you have to waste by backing yourself into the right corner. You might quickly develop your own strategies as you play this game which help you to keep playing up to the higher levels.

But about those higher levels... Sadly, there are only eight levels programmed into this game. After beating level eight (I did it with two moves left... whew!), the game starts back at level one, and you play through again as before. What makes this a bit disheartening is that it's the exact same levels over again, with the same starting number of moves, the same sized field to play on, everything the same as earlier (except for the random numbers and possibly your starting position). Of course, no two rounds will ever be the same, but the fact that the level of difficulty regresses back to square one puts a bit of a damper on the game.

As for the music, I know that the included track by Kevin Macleod was originally considered for the music for Tonypa's recent CoBaCoLi, but was later switched out for something else. Hopickston seems to lend itself for this vocal percussion mix better. That being said, the constant starting and stopping of the music might irritate some people (since the music starts after you've been inactive for a couple of seconds, so it might almost serve as a reason for some people to play faster!). So by all means, hop to it!

Play Hopickston

Cheers to Shannon for sending this one in! =)