#025 - Snark: Mugwump 3.0

Release Date: September, 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre: Puzzle

Developer(s): Bob Albrecht, Kent T. Kehrberg

Publisher(s): People's Computer Company

Here we have yet another game in the Mugwump family. This one is probably the strangest of the bunch in terms of its gameplay also, with a focus on circles instead of cartography.

Snark is, like its two older brothers, written by Bob Albrecht of People's Computer Company. Additional assistance was provided by Kent T. Kehrberg to convert the game into CDC BASIC. Kehrberg adapted a few other games into different forms of BASIC, and appeared to work for the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC). If you don't already know MECC, believe me - you will soon enough. 

Snark was never included in an edition of PCC's newsletter, instead first appearing in 1974's PCC Games booklet. I don't know where MobyGames gets its September '73 release date from, as the source code doesn't provide any dates, nor is there any other evidence I could find to support this date.

An official write-up for Snark comes in PCC's What to Do After You Hit Return book from 1975. It doesn't really give out much information on the game, but it does inform us that the titular Snark originated from Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark. I'd never heard of this particular work before; Wikipedia describes its genre as "literary nonsense," so I assume it's about as weird as you'd expect, being a Lewis Carroll work.

Albrecht took inspiration from the poem for the game explanation.

Anyway, I digress. Snark's page also includes something of an explanation of how the game works. I say "something" because it's not exactly a satisfactory explanation. It took me a long time of staring with a confused look to understand it. In fact, it only clicked while writing this very paragraph. I'd already played, recorded and scored the game at this time, so I went back to try again now that it made sense to me. 

Guesses in this game are almost like radar pulses - you select a spot on the grid to guess, which becomes the centre of the circle, or radar pulse, if we continue with the radar analogy. You then select the size of the circle's radius, and the game will tell you if the Snark in outside, inside, or "on" the circle. The number selected for the radius applies to all sides of the circle, i.e. a radius of 2 will mean that the circle goes out 2 points in all directions. At this point, I have no idea what the difference between "inside" and "on" is. I think "on" might mean that the Snark is on the circumference of the circle, it's not made explicitly clear, but that would make sense to me. [Spoiler: it makes sense down the page.]

Here's how the game tries to explain itself.

This lack of clarity in the rules of the game led me to have a rather torrid time in my first playthrough. I started with a strategy of selecting equidistant points on the grid as my starting guesses (2,2 -> 7,2 -> 2,7 -> 7,7) to make sure I covered most of the grid. I got a hit one 2,7, and must have checked and double-checked every point around it, becoming quite frustrated by the end. The point I needed was 4,9 - which took 47 guesses.

End my suffering. Please.

This is a good example of how a poorly explained game can negatively impact perception of a game. I felt lost, confused, and unsure of how the game worked. Once I understood how the game was supposed to work, it became a whole lot easier, and I could guess where the Snark was in under 15 guesses.

An example of how it goes when I know what I'm doing.

The game saying that at the point 8,1, with a radius of 1, has the Snark on the circle, means that, as I suspected, the Snark is on the circle's circumference. It therefore can be on any point on that circumference. With this being a grid-based game, this results in the only options being one space in each of the four cardinal directions. On the grid, this translates to the only options for the Snark's hiding space being 7,1 (West), 9,1 (East), 8,0 (South) and 8,2 (North). 9,1 was correct in this instance. 

Hopefully that makes more sense than the book's explanation. Hopefully my scores also make sense.

Time Played: 10 minutes

Difficulty: 4 (Mild)

Much of the difficulty comes from simply trying to figure out how the bloody game works. It's not that difficult once this is achieved.

Gameplay: 4

What to Do After You Hit Return does a terrible job of explaining the game, and the game itself doesn't do much better. As a result, it's confusing to play. Understanding what the difference between "inside" and "on" the circle takes time, and the book obfuscates how the circle radius works.

It does start to make a little bit more sense once you start playing, but there's still an overall sense of uncertainty hanging over the game. I was able to create a basic guessing strategy, but, like Hurkle, strategic options are limited by there only being one creature to find. Just another inferior variant of Mugwump.

Controls: 5

Standard.

Visual: 5

Standard.

Functionality: 5

It seemed to work without issue from what I could tell.

Accessibility: 2

This one is less accessible because of how poorly explained it is.

Fun Factor: 1

I did not enjoy fumbling around with Snark's mechanics whatsoever. It ends up being far more frustrating to play than anything.

Snark obviously ends up being the clear loser of the trio of Mugwump games, only returning a score of 22 to sit it in the E-tier with the large group of 1Queen, Qubic, LEM, Trap and Mathdice. Snark, after tiebreaker rules, sits above Mathdice and Trap to be in 24th place overall.

Next, we sing The Beatles.

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