The computer nerds began as two guys in The Tale of the Turtle, but became a group of four in Goat-Roping Heathens and thereafter. In each book the nerds create a different game. Their first game is simply called Black Turtle. It is a basic two-dimensional, tile-based game that's actually pretty difficult to explain in a couple sentences and so you ought to try it out by clicking here! The second game is called Black Turtle Miner (click to play) and although it looks very similar to the first game, it has a very different set of rules. The third game, the one created by the nerds in Hot Springs Casualties, also looks similar to the first two games, but is actually an entirely different game. The game is called Maximum Black Turtle (click here to try it out).

That pretty much covers the games written by the computer nerds in the books from the Black Turtle series that have been published so far, but, wait, there's more! At this time there are four more books planned for the series and each book has its own game. While the first game was original (I know of no other game quite like it), the others are adaptions of existing games. Try them out and you'll probably notice the similarities. While the game for book four will deviate somewhat from the Black Turtle game format, the games for books five and six will return to the normal Black Turtle format. The game for book five is called Black Turtle Matching and the game for book six is called Black Turtle Evolution. The game for book seven is another deviant, but that's pretty much par for the course in the Black Turtle series. The plans for these as yet unpublished books are somewhat tentative, but the games paired with the books mentioned in this blog show that games that are quite similar in appearance can be quite different in how they are played. By the way, there are a total of seven books planned for the Black Turtle series, each with its own game, just to be perfectly clear on the anticipated structure for the entire series.