Welcome to Metasquared.com! The news below refers to important events concerning both the website and Metasquarer, a free program that allows you to play Metasquares online again. Please be sure to check our forums regularly.

Briefly, Metasquares is an online puzzle game similar to Reversi or Go. For more detail, visit the what is it? and how to play sections of the site.

  Haven't been here since the last redesign? Run your mouse over the "metasquares" and "metasquarer" links above for dropdown menus. Use the arrows on the right of the content to scroll up and down. If you're interested in Metasquarer's progress, be sure to take a look at our growth and rating charts.

News:

January 25, 2007

MetaTools has made available an official client for the iPhone. It doesn't support online play yet.

September 27, 2007

In honor of what is roughly the 10th anniversary of Metasquarer, I would like to hold a tournament, with prizes to be determined but probably including involvement in future development of Metasquares and a t-shirt or something. Please see the forums for details.

April 21, 2007

Build 73 is out! This build features new plugins that allow you to play on a board with random spaces made unavailable, adding variety to the game and foiling the opening books of some bots. The next release is going to be numbered 8.0 and will feature a much stronger AI and the ability to play games with greater than 2 players.

January 26, 2007

Look for some vast improvements to the AI in the coming weeks. I'm working on an AI using the MTD(f) algorithm that should be capable of beating even the most skilled players. I'm also readying a paper on this approach for publication. I need some volunteers to play against the new AI on different depths. The data gathered from those games will be used to tune the AI and will likely appear, stripped of identifiable information, in the publication. Contact me if interested.

July 24, 2006

Build 72 has been released. This is primarily a bugfix release, though there are a few aesthetic and functional changes. It is strongly recommended that you download this build, as earlier builds will no longer function using the default settings due to DNS changes.

Please use metasquared.com, rather than metasquares.com, to access this site from now on. The addresses are perfect mirrors, but I may eventually transfer metasquares.com away. I will explain what is going on shortly.

June 7, 2006

Please use metasquared.com, rather than metasquares.com, to access this site from now on. The addresses are perfect mirrors, but I may eventually transfer metasquares.com away. I will explain what is going on shortly.

March 30, 2006

Look for a Flash version of Metasquarer sometime this summer. It will be free to play. Announcements will be sent to the mailing list.

March 26. 2006

The new server is up at metasquarer.dyndns.org. It's free to play on for now.

March 17, 2006

Well, here's the deal: Freenode does not allow private messages anymore, which prevents Metasquarer from running on it. Please stop emailing me about this; it is out of my control. We really need a dedicated IRC server that we control the policy of to run the game. The cheapest IRC hosting service I've found is $12/month, but, remembering how much this game cost me to keep running over the years (hint: thousands, and I was 12 years old when I developed version 1.0 of Metasquarer), I'm not going to put down any more money into it unless I am sure that I can recoup it. Ad revenue has not been enough, donations of both funds and resources have been nonexistent, and HireGeeks is still too young to generate significant revenue.

Basically, the only recourse left is to register for IRC hosting and then charge a small monthly fee (around $5/month) for access to the official server. If no better ideas surface, I am going to try this starting in April.

February 20, 2006

If you've ever needed a geek to help you with something, or are one yourself, you may be interested in the business I just launched. If the business becomes profitable, I will again be able to run the Metasquarer server myself.

January 12, 2006

Due to the lack of donations and the cost of keeping the site up, I've decided to place text ads on the site. I've tried to make them as unobtrusive as possible. I hate them as much as you do, but the site has cost me almost $4,000 to keep up already!
I've also heard that there are problems connecting to FreeNode. Again, since I no longer run the official server (that was where most of that $4,000 came from), there is nothing I can do about this.

July 31, 2005

The site's code has been completely rewritten from scratch, though the design remains the same. I wrote the original content of this site when I was around 12 years old. Consequently, there were many spelling, grammatical, and HTML errors that I decided I simply could not suffer anymore. The new design validates to XHTML 1.0 Transitional.