Review of Fathom It! by TUCOWS () ================================= While Battleship was fun, you always needed a buddy to play. With Fathom It! that aspect is gone since it uses a mix of Minesweeper and Battleship for a single-player puzzle.

You are given the sizes of the ships in a small window that appears on the right side of the screen. Use the sizes to mark spots and find all of the ships.

While not a groundbreaking title, Fathom It! definitely has a way of getting you addicted.
-==KapTeNKrYloN==- Moshe Rubin's response ====================== I realize reviewers have heavy schedules and cannot always give a product the reviewing time it needs. I'm afraid, however, that the reviewer here completely missed what Fathom It! is. It is NOT a single-player version of the search-and-sink game we played in school -- there are scores of such shareware applications out there today. Fathom It! is a solitaire logic puzzle based on the extremely popular battleship puzzle genre published in quality puzzle magazines around the world (e.g., GAMES, World of Puzzles, BreinBrekker, Sekaibunka). With Fathom It! there is no guessing-and-praying. Each Fathom It! board is a specially crafted puzzle solved purely by logical deduction. Just take a look at http://www.mountainvistasoft.com/brd-info.htm for chess-like analyses of Fathom It! puzzles. Here are some inaccuracies in the review: (1) "... it uses a mixture of Minesweeper and Battleship ...": Fathom It! does not have anything in common with Minesweeper. Digits within a Minesweeper puzzle denote the number of neighboring ship segments. In Fathom It!, digits are located outside of the board, and denote the total number of ship segments along a row or column. (2) "You are given the sizes of the ships in a small window that appears on the right side of the screen. Use the sizes to mark spots and find all of the ships.": You are not given the _size_ of the ships (the ships on the right are always there, and denote the ship fleet to be found), but rather the number of _ship segments_ along a given row or column. (3) "While not a groundbreaking title ...": While I believe "Fathom It!" is a clever double-entendre (a fathom is a naval measurement, and the "fathom it" in English means to figure something out), the comment is irrelevant to the review. By the way, Fathom It! was the first Windows adaptation of this fascinating puzzle genre. It remains the preeminent solitaire battleship game program, and continues to receive rave reviews by renowned puzzle gurus (you may want to read what luminaries in the puzzle world write about Fathom It! at http://www.mountainvistasoft.com/reviews.htm). Fathom It! bundles within an incredible way to learn the art of solving Fathom It! puzzles: it has a built-in rule-based expert system that will provide a complete hint, in lucid English, for any Fathom It! puzzle, in any situation. Here's the description I provide for Fathom It!: FATHOM IT! v1.2 - Fathom It!, a logical puzzle, is a fascinating Windows version of GAMES Magazine's column "Battleships". Unlike the classic pencil-and-paper game of battleship, Fathom It! boards are solved using logical deduction only. You'll find Fathom It! board solutions have a chess-like beauty. Try solving a Fathom It! board or two and see why. Registered version comes with 32,000 boards, divided into easy, intermediate, hard and expert categories. Has automatic board solver. Windows 3.x and up, with color/gray scale/monochrome display modes. Resizes up to entire screen, ideal for vision-impaired users. If your reviewer will take a new look at Fathom It!, s/he will realize that the current review in TUCOWS does not do justice to the product. Thanking you for your time, Moshe Rubin Mountain Vista Software mosher@mountainvistasoft.com http://www.mountainvistasoft.com