Diabolika
What is it?
On a 12×12 board, five demons are randomly placed. Your task is to kill them all, using various tiles with different effects. These tiles will, within their range, destroy demons and trigger other tiles. Since you get eight tiles but can ignite (trigger) only two of them, you will have to try to create chain reactions.
Take a look at the screenshot above. This puzzle is already solved. I will first ignite the hydra near the bottom left corner. It will spit fire left and right, destroying the demon to its left and triggering the kannon to its right. The kannon will shoot a ball that triggers/destroys everything in its path, in this case first the exploder (the green bottle), which takes care of all the eight fields around it, and then the magik missle (any weird spellings are exactly like this in the game).
The missle is thus launched, and will hit the target I placed above it. There, it acts like an exploder. The resulting chain reaction will take care of the two demons up there. Now all that's left is the little guy on the cross. He is a bonus tile, worth 50 points. I can take care of him with my second ignite. The turn is over, and the board will be repopulated with new demons. As you progress there will be more demons, and tougher ones taking more than one shot to kill.
So far, so good, but there are two issues that in the end ruined my fun in the game: you have to place eight tiles, and have to use both ignites in each turn. If you place tiles and don't trigger them, they remain on the board, just like any demons you didn't kill. But will they be of use in the next turn?
While they at least might, the second ignite sometimes simply has to be wasted by using it on an empty tile. Thus there is no real reward for clearing the whole board with a single chain reaction, or using less than eight tiles. This makes the game somewhat repetitive, and as much as I liked the basic concept, I didn't play it for very long.
Four years later, Derek Yu rewrote the game as Diabolika 2. This remake has better graphics, new music and some added tiles, and is on the whole preferrable. It did not, however, fix the abovementioned issues.
Instead of the sacrifice, which gives you extra points, you will now occasionally get a mandrake. When the mandrake is destroyed, you will get one of the three possible special units in the next round:
I liked Diabolika 2 better than the old Diabolika. It has better graphics, better music, the added units are interesting. Still it wasn't a game I wanted to keep on playing.
