Down And Out

Down and Out is a Macintosh peg-solitaire style puzzle by Tobias Peciva, released around 2000. A grid of pebbles fills the board, and the player jumps and removes them one by one with the goal of clearing as many as possible. Easy to learn, the game rewards the patient calculation typical of solitaire-board puzzles.

Concept

The play surface is a board of pebbles that must be cleared by jump-and-capture moves, in the tradition of peg solitaire. Casual players can dabble; serious solvers must plan moves several steps ahead to avoid stranding lone pebbles.

Presentation

The Mac build offers a clean colour board with crisp pebble graphics and quiet, undistracting feedback - very much in the Mac shareware idiom of small puzzle games doing one thing well.

Author

Tobias Peciva also produced other small Mac puzzle and utility releases in the late System 7 to early OS X period; Down and Out is one of his most-circulated titles.

System

Down and Out is a PowerPC build that runs from System 7 through to Mac OS X via Classic, and needs a colour monitor.