Clines: Addictive Game for Firefox

Thanks to extensions you can do pretty much anything without leaving the convenience of your favorite browser. But can you play games? Indeed, you can. There are a few rather good games you can play right from within Firefox. One such game is Clines, a clone of a popular Color Lines game for DOS.

The original game was developed by Oleg Demin, and it was hugely popular in Russia along with another Russian blockbuster Tetris. The idea behind Clines is rather simple. Using the mouse, you have to align at least five balls of the same color horizontally, vertically, or diagonally on the 9×9 field. When you do that, the row disappears. Your task is to align and remove as many balls as you can. It may sound like a dead-simple thing to do, but it is not. Each time you move a ball, the game places randomly three new balls on the field, and they can block the ball you want to move. As the number of balls on the field grows, moving them around becomes more and more difficult. Every time you make a line, you receive points depending on how many balls there are in the line:

5 balls — 11 points
6 balls — 15 points
7 balls — 21 points
8 balls –29 points
9 balls — 39 points

During the game, you can undo your previous move. But there is a catch: you can undo up to three moves for free; after that, you lose points every time you undo a move. The game play is focused on solving the puzzle, so there is no time limit to worry about. Clines may not rival full-blown games, but it makes a perfect diversion during lunch breaks.