Traversal

Traversal is Catara Software's $10 shareware puzzle game for early Mac OS X, billed by author Catara as an "addictive coffee-break game" - a round or two finishes in the time it takes a latte to cool. The object: eliminate as many tiles as possible from the board without boxing yourself in.

The puzzle

Each round starts with a populated tile grid. The player traverses tiles, removing them as they go, with the obvious-once-you-try-it trap that the path can wall itself off if planned poorly. The author's own line is the cleanest summary: "easier said than done." Three difficulty levels each carry their own independent high-score list.

Coffee-break game design

Traversal is built around very short sessions - the kind of game you launch when you have five minutes and quit when your drink is ready. The high-score lists per difficulty are the explicit replay hook the author leans on for boasting rights against friends.

Platform

Unlike most Info-Mac shareware, Traversal is Mac OS X-only - the BinHex header explicitly says "Requires MacOS X." There is no Classic 68k or PPC fallback build, and the package is a Cocoa-era download rather than a Mac OS 9 application.

Provenance

Self-published by Catara Software (catara@mac.com, product page at http://homepage.mac.com/catara/products). Distributed as traversal-10.hqx under info-mac/game. There is no Macintosh Garden page, no MobyGames record, and no contemporary review trail; the BinHex header is effectively the canonical preserved description of the title.