About

There are a many variations of the classic Lights Out game possible. The most obvious changes you can make have already been encountered in the Deluxe - changing the board size and the move type. The game can of course be played on a square or rectangular board of any size. The basic solving strategy does not change, as you can still chase lights down to the last row. Each board size will have its own quiet patterns though (or possibly none at all). The effect of a move could be changed, i.e. pressing a button gives a pattern other than a vertical cross, for example the diagonal cross of the Deluxe, or the Knight's Game of the XL 25. If a button changes lights that are not adjacent but further away then light chasing becomes quite tricky if not impossible. The behaviour at the edges of the board can be changed too. The columns of buttons on the left and right sides could be considered to be adjacent, i.e. as if the board were curved around into a cylinder. If the top and bottom sides are also considered adjacent, the board is in effect a torus. On this board it is more difficult to chase lights effectively because you will not end up with a single row of lights but two rows of lights. This was seen in the Mini Lights Out. The game can also be played on something other than a recangular grid. One such radically different version is the Orbix, which is played on the 12 faces of a dodecahedron. Any graph can be used as the playing field for this game. Lastly you can change the number of colours. This was seen in Lights Out 2000, which has 3 states, but you could use more colours too. It is even possible to mix different numbers of colours for example by having some buttons use only 2 states while others have 3, though I have not yet seen such a variant. Usually repeated button presses cycle the affected lights through all possible states. One unusual variant is TileToggle which has 4 colours and two types of move. If your browser has JavaScript, then you can play some Lights Out variants by clicking the link below. The board can be any rectangular size from 3×3 to 10×10, can be a rectangle, cylinder or torus, and the move shape can be changed too. It is a little slow however when you change the board size or move type, because it has to find the new move matrix and invert it, as explained in the mathematics section.