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I really like the addition of the stamps. Playing for all three compatible stamps at the same time is a very different game which requires a different strategy, and a lot more deduction, so if anyone is missing that element, I recommend playing in this mode. I seldom make use of all the additional pieces of monster information when I'm clearing the board, but they're much more important in a stamp game.

OK, after a bunch of paper and pencil calculations I remembered that the game has a debug mode. :) I compared a couple of strategies for using the scrolls (various numbers of scrolls and different bonuses ignored or not), and I can see now how the maths works.

The lower early value of the scrolls is partially offset by the lower amount of XP needed to level at the early stages, which makes the penalty less noticeable in a typical game, but in extreme cases (all available scrolls spent before any levelling) the constant low value of the scrolls plus the additional HP gained and spent during levelling is not enough to match the increasing XP cost of levelling. That was the missing link for me.

I'm not convinced by the argument that you should save heart scrolls because they're "worth more" later in the game. Levelling is also "worth more" later in the game! In my experience, if you use a scroll earlier, you'll have more XP for levelling later, and in the end game it all comes out in the wash.

You should save heart scrolls because:

1. You can use a heart scroll at any time, but you can only level if you have enough XP. You can get stuck with not enough XP and either no hearts available to get more or no safe moves available to get more.

2. Using a heart scroll makes you repeat the current heart level. This can be damaging early in the game, when you have a much more limited set of safe moves available, they don't always open up more safe moves, and using up more of them without progressing towards being able to take out bigger monsters (especially the mine king) can hurt you.

The time to think about this is not when you have no choice but to use a heart scroll, but when you are considering possible monster combinations earlier -- it's usually better to fill your XP and level than to risk not filling it and falling short. Especially if you're trying to get the rat stamp, which makes exploration very risky, and makes eliminating known monsters until you find the rat king a lot safer.

Another future feature request suggestion, following up on various ideas for different difficulties: a custom mode where you can select a board size, monster population, and dragon HP (within certain size limits), and then export the configuration as a string that another player can import. A lot of these combinations would probably be silly and not playable, but it would be cool if people could create and share the interesting ones.

Have you tried it since the Mine King was re-re-adjusted to HP 10? It was much harder when he was HP 11, but now it seems comparable to the old version in difficulty.

My general strategy: in the early game, I try to open as much of the board as possible (so I favour multiple small monsters over one big one, and favour revealing squares over clearing known monsters). I never waste a heart -- if I have no other safe moves, I punch a wall. I try to reveal the monsters with the special scrolls (especially the Mine King) as soon as I can -- exploring the board helps to narrow down where they are. The sooner I can blow up the mines, the sooner I can get their points and make the board safer to clear! In the end game I try to clear the monsters largest first, so that I can use up exact numbers of hearts before levelling or using a heart scroll. The walls are more predictable now; in the previous version I would clear them before the lowest-level monsters, but now I leave them for last.

For security reasons, browsers impose limitations on pages that you open locally through your filesystem. You have to use a local webserver. There are many options for setting one up permanently, but if you have Python 3 installed a very simple temporary option is to run python3 -m http.server inside the directory. Tested on Linux; should work as-is on Mac; on Windows you may need to add the Python executable to your path or use the full path to it.

Either the 10 HP mine king makes a huge difference or the latest update rebalanced something else -- I'm suddenly regularly able to clear the board again. :D

Did the mimic and the mine king swap HP again? 🤔

This is a great game which has provided me with hours of entertainment -- thank you for making it!

Here's some feedback about the new version:

Pros:

* New marking method: awesome! So much better than cycling through the numbers.

* Overall, I like that the game is more difficult now. In the previous version, if you don't have bad luck or screw up, you're pretty much guaranteed a perfect score every time. In this version this is more of a challenge. (Some of the difficulty is probably due to me not noticing some subtleties in the patterns; I just figured out something new while writing this comment. :) )

* New level 9 monsters -- yay! It makes guessing harder, and I like the pattern.

Neutral (not sure how I feel about these):

* Identical walls: I liked the unpredictability of the variable walls in the previous version, but maybe this didn't work as well with the adjusted stats.

* New gnome animation and sound: I don't love this, but it does make it clearer how the gnome works.

Cons:

* The board arbitrarily resizing to the window height: this causes the graphics to be antialiased / blurred, which does not flatter the pixel art, especially since different elements appear blurred to different degrees. When I resize my window to make the board smaller (the same size as the previous version), everything looks much better.

* The translucent chests and broken walls: I think this adds unnecessary visual clutter to the board.

* The board feels a lot more cramped now somehow; I'm not sure if it's the way the new crystal ball works, or the double walls, or one of the other changes. It kind of feels as if there are too many things going on for a board this size. It would be cool to be able to select between a few different board sizes and complexities with appropriately adjusted dragon health (e.g. a small board with only a small number and subset of monsters and a weak dragon, a medium board with more monsters and monster types, and a large board with everything -- that would follow the vibe of classic Minesweeper, where the three standard board sizes provide different styles of gameplay).

P. S. Will there be an updated download for the hotfixed new version?

Compatibility info for Linux and Mac users: I've just finished replaying all of the games on Linux. I mostly used the HD versions that I purchased a decade ago, but I realised that although I definitely bought Submachine 10 I didn't have a copy of the SWF anywhere (although I did have the free web version), so I repurchased the latest EXE version of that specific game. I was able to extract the SWF without any issues using the Python script linked from this page.

I assume that the collection is still fully playable in the standalone flash player, although I have not tested this directly with these new builds (unfortunately I'd already played through my old copies of 1-9 when I found this page). These games have brought me a lot of joy over the years, so I will probably buy this collection soon and replay them again, using all of the new builds, and report back.

I was able to play through most of the collection using the latest version of Ruffle, with some exceptions:

1. Submachine 10 struggled visibly in some graphics-heavy sections and eventually crashed when I played it on a laptop with 8G of RAM (and Firefox open!). I then moved to a laptop with a lot more memory available, and it was fine, except...

2. Submachine 10 consistently crashed towards the end of the game when I clicked on a specific portal. I don't know if this is an issue with this specific version of Ruffle, or this new build of Submachine 10, or my specific graphics hardware or software. I was able to copy the save file from just before the crash from Ruffle to Flash, play that short section in the standalone flash player that I still have, then copy the save file back and play the rest of the game in Ruffle.

WARNING: the game only saves progress (in Ruffle) if you exit the program normally. If you play the whole game without saving and it crashes, you will lose all of your progress. I did this twice, because I don't learn from my mistakes, and then started quitting periodically to save.

3. 32 Chambers has a glitch in Ruffle which breaks the game. I played this whole game in the standalone flash player.

It's worth noting that Ruffle is an actively developed project with multiple contributors. While I was looking into these issues, I found a lot of reports of previous problems in the Submachine games which have since been resolved -- so these outstanding issues may also be fixed soon.

Ooh, thanks! I'd never seen that rotating menu before. I found two other places where you can place critter traps. I also saw the fish trap location but was also unable to use it.

How do we equip them, and what do the spots look like? I've added traps to my inventory a bunch of times (after buying them), but I can't find a way to use them explicitly and I haven't found any spots on the ground where they activate. I may be missing something obvious. :)

What's the best place to report bugs? I reported one in the Steam forum, but I actually got the game here (in the bundle).

Another possible bug: if I store more than the required amount of food for a stabled critter, it all gets consumed in a single day anyway. Not sure if this is intentional behaviour -- it would be useful to store a supply of food for several days in advance.

Apart from that, this is a cool game, and it's great that you made it available so early. I'm a recent arrival, but it must have been fascinating to watch it develop incrementally from the beginning. It's a valuable opportunity to collect feedback, and offers both non-programmers and people interested in learning programming insight into the amount of work that goes into this kind of project and how it develops over time.

Fantastic!

Edit: I successfully ran the game in Ubuntu 17.10.

There is a bug which is triggered when the game is run on a screen with multiple monitors, at least in my window manager (Fluxbox) and with my monitor layout (where the primary monitor on which the game is fullscreened is an external monitor larger than the laptop screen). The screen geometry is not calculated correctly, and the game screen is displayed oddly resized within the fullscreened window. Additionally, the game does not detect the position of the mouse cursor correctly -- everything is offset.

My initial workaround was to disable the external monitor. I then disabled fullscreen before I exited the game, and when I launched it again (with the monitor re-enabled) it remembered the fullscreen preference but the other issues were still present (in the non-fullscreened window). However, after playing around with the window I found that manually resizing the window causes everything to be redrawn correctly, and fixes all the issues. It is then also possible to fullscreen the game on the external monitor correctly.

For any other Linux users encountering the same issue:

1. F11 to exit fullscreen if necessary

2. alt-drag the window until you get to a corner or to the maximise button

3. Resize the window by dragging the corner or maximising. Now everything should be rendered correctly.

4. Now you should be able to resize the window however you like, or fullscreen it again with F11.

You may need to do this every time you launch the game, but you may be able to use the features of your window manager to automatically resize the window for you on launch. That is completely dependent on your environment. For example, in Fluxbox you can choose to remember various window properties, and this allowed me to create a persistent solution.

Ah, I see. In that case I'll see if I can get the Windows executable to run under Wine. Thanks!

Is this still a Flash game? Any chance of a bare .swf file, which could be played on Linux? I have previously been able to extract the .swf from the packaged Mac version and run it in a browser or with the standalone flash player, but there's nothing I can do with an IFF data file.