Mastermind – Review

Our rating:

By: Piotr Bialkowski

Version #: 1.0

Date Released: 2008-08-20

Developer:

Price: 2.99

User Rating:

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Mastermind is an iPhone implementation of the popular board game of the same name. If you’re familiar with the mechanics of the board game, then you won’t have a difficult time figuring out how to play it on the iPhone platform. If you’re new to the game, an easy to understand ‘How to Play’ section is provided for your benefit.

For the uninitiated, Mastermind is a classic code-breaking game where you try to figure out the correct combination of a set of colored pegs in as few guesses as possible. As an example, in the iPhone game’s Easy mode, you will have to work with four peg holes and seven possible colors. You can fill a hole by tapping on that hole then tapping a peg from the set of seven colored pegs that appears. The hole will then be filled with your chosen peg. When you’re done filling all four holes, tap the ‘Accept’ text block to the right of the holes to reveal your clues. The clues are in the form of little black or white dots placed in holes smaller than the ones used for the pegs. The respective numbers of the black and white dots signify the accuracy of your guess. The number of black dots tells you how many pegs are in the right place while the number of white dots tell you how many pegs whose colors are included in the code but whose positions are currently wrong are in your current guess. Confused? Don’t worry. As soon as you play a game, the rules will cease to be as complicated as I make it sound.

You are allowed up to ten turns. If you don’t guess the code correctly by your tenth try, you lose, and the correct combination is displayed and on to the next game you go. I’d like to have the option, though, to go back and review my guesses and compare them to the correct combination. That way, I can track my moves and perhaps learn at which points I got this or that wrong.

Including the Easy mode, the game has a total of four modes, the other three being Medium, Hard, and Master. The Medium mode has five peg holes and seven possible peg colors, the Hard mode has five holes and nine colors, and the Master mode has five holes and nine colors but duplicate colors or repeatability in the code is allowed. There’s also an option to play with pegs marked with symbols instead of the default color-coded pegs, an accessibility feature for color-blind players.

The interface of this adaptation of Mastermind is just brilliant. The appearance is shiny and the controls are responsive as well as intuitive. If you enjoy playing Mastermind as a physical board game, you’d enjoy it even more as an iPhone game. Just make sure that iPhone game is this.