galaxis(6) Manual Page

galaxis

Lifeboats from a crippled interstellar liner are adrift in a starfield. To find them, you can place probes that look in all eight compass directions and tell you how many lifeboats they see. If you drop a probe directly on a lifeboat it will be revealed immediately. Your objective: find the lifeboats as quickly as possible, before the stranded passengers run out of oxygen!

This is a UNIX-hosted, curses-based clone of the nifty little Macintosh freeware game Galaxis. It doesn’t have the super-simple, point-and-click interface of the original, but compensates by automating away some of the game’s simpler deductions.

The game screen includes a description of all commands, including "?" for detailed help.

The Macintosh game was designed and written by Christian Franz <cfranz@iiic.ethz.ch>. This version was cloned by Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>. See ESR’s home page at http://www.catb.org/~esr/ for updates and other resources.

This really ought to be an X game, but that would have been too much like work.