Last Updated on: 22nd September 2023, 10:29 am
Web site: github.com/kilobyte/el-ixir
Category: Games
Sub-Category: Board, Console
Platform: Linux, UNIX-like
License: GNU GPL
Interface: CLI
Wikipedia:
First release: 1990
El‐Ixir – a board game with an element of randomness. It is played by two players at the same terminal, although it is possible to use a shared tmux for remote play.
The game should be playable on any vt100ish terminal whose character set includes a certain subset of glyphs of IBM ROM BIOS, encoded as Unicode. Terminals not meeting this requirement should be long extinct.
It appears to have been invented by a company named Isoft in 1981, released as a booter floppy for PC/XT. Alas, no copy seems to be available anywhere on the ‘Net. Two other remakes can be found on defunct-but-archived webpages, although each of them has rules slightly different from the original (or at least from how I remember the original).
Unlike those two, this remake (which I made somewhere around 1990) tries to be exactly same as the original, in both gameplay and appearance — again, as exact as a 12 years old kid remembered a game he last played at an age of six.
What’s missing is music and an alternate display mode that used CGA 40×25 text. On the other hand, the game is playable on any modern Unix-like system, with a vt100ish terminal whose character set includes glyphs of IBM ROM BIOS (aka CP437), obviously using Unicode.
The project founder is Adam Borowski.