Chain Reaction is a strategy connection game for 2 to 8 players.

The objective of Chain Reaction is to take control of the board by eliminating your opponent’s orbs by connecting 2 or 3 matching coloured smilies on the board.

Players take turns to place their smiley bubbles in a cell. Once a cell has reached critical mass the balls explode into the surrounding cells adding an extra orb or smiley ball and claiming the cell for the player. A player may only place their orbs in a blank cell or a cell that contains orbs of their colour and it’s occupied. As soon as a player loses all their orbs or smiley balls they are out of the game. Each player can customise the colour of their orbs (smilies).

I will be describing the rules of the two-player game but this could be generalised to any number of players.

The gameplay takes place on an X * Y board.

For each cell on the board, we define a critical mass. The critical mass is equal to the number of orthogonally adjacent cells. That would be 4 for usual cells, 3 for cells in the edge and 2 for cells in the corner.

All cells are initially empty. The Player-1 and the Player-2 take turns placing “orbs” of their corresponding colours. Player 1 can only place a (first) orb in an empty cell or a cell which already contains one or more second orbs. When two or more orbs are placed in the same cell, they stack up.

When a cell is loaded with several orbs equal to its critical high mass, the stack immediately explodes. As a result of the explosion, to each of the orthogonally adjacent cells, an orb is added and the initial cell loses as many orbs as its critical mass. The explosions might result in the overloading of an adjacent cell and the chain reaction of explosion continues until every cell is stable.
When a second cell explodes and there are first cells around, the first cells are converted to the second and the other rules of explosions still follow. The same rule applies to other colours.

The winner is the one who eliminates every other player’s coloured orbs.
Hoping that you all will enjoy this pretty good connection with Chain Reaction game.