After starting Sogo (see installation
section) , the menu screen appears as shown on the right. You have 4
choices:
You can also quit the program by pressing the escape button. |
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After a game is started, the playfield is drawn as the picture on the
left shows. The playfield consists of 16 poles, which are ordered in an array
of 4 by 4 poles. On each pole up to 4 spheres can be put so that there can
be at most 64 poles on the playfield. The playfield can be viewed from arbitrary perspectives. To change the viewpoint of the playfield, just hold the right mouse button and move the mouse. Moving the mouse sideways will turn the viewpoint around the playfield, whereas moving the mouse forewards and backwards will change the height of the viewer. A different viewpoint of the same scene is shown in the picture on the bottom left. This is very intuitive indeed. The red player begins and chooses a pole to put a sphere onto. To choose a sphere, use the mouse pointer to pick a pole. Once the pole of your choice is marked, you can click the left mouse button to put the sphere onto that pole. |
| After the red player's move it is white's turn as shown in the picture on the right. If the white player is a computer player, the sphere will automatically be moved onto the pole that the computer player chooses. |  |
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The game ends when a player succeeded in connecting four spheres. There
are many different ways to connect four spheres, though, because the playfield
is three-dimensional. The two pictures on the left show two possibilities
how the spheres can be connected. Here, they are connected vertically and
spatially diagonal. If the playfield is filled completely with spheres, it is a tie, and neither player wins the game. However, this situation has never occured as yet. You can abort a game and return to the menu by pressing the escape button at any time. When the game is over, however, you can return to the menu by pressing the left mouse button. |