Amidar

Named after drawing lots

Amidar's enemies don't move randomly. Their patrol style is named after amidakuji, the Japanese method of drawing lots: you draw vertical lines, add random horizontal rungs, then trace down from the top, taking every rung you meet, and where you come out decides your prize. Japanese schools and TV shows still use amidakuji to hand out chores and prizes, which is a nice thing to know while its descendants hunt you around a grid. The name goes back further still, to Amida Buddha, because the oldest versions drew the lines in a fan shape like the halo in his images. Konami built this 1981 arcade game around that stepped, ladder-like motion, and American arcades got it through Stern the following year. Reading the patrols is the puzzle underneath the action: watch a chaser for a few seconds and its circuit becomes predictable, which is exactly what lets you plan a route through it.

Outline boxes, don't just wander

You move a marker along the lines of the grid with the arrow keys, WASD, a swipe, or the on-screen d-pad, and every segment you cross gets painted. Completely outline all four sides of a box and it fills in for points; fill every box to clear the board. The mistake beginners make is painting lines aimlessly, because half-painted edges scattered everywhere score nothing. Target one box at a time and trace its missing sides to close it. Better yet, work in strips: adjacent boxes share edges, so every side you paint between two neighbours is progress on both at once, and a smart path finishes one box while leaving you already halfway around the next. Chip away at the long outer border whenever a safe moment appears, rather than saving that whole slow lap for a nervous finish. Painted lines cost nothing to walk again, so loop back over finished ground whenever it keeps you out of trouble.

Living with the chasers

Enemies patrol the same lines you paint on, so you can't paint through a chaser sitting on your path, and touching one costs a life. You have three. The safest square on the grid is usually the one a patroller just left, because the ladder-style circuits rarely double back right away. Walking in behind an enemy feels wrong and is right. Time your runs to slip into the gap after one passes, and use the corners and the perimeter while the pack loops through the middle, since an edge box can often be worked in peace. When the middle empties out, that's your window for the interior lines. Before committing to a long one, glance at the two nearest patrols and time your entry for the moment one has just cleared your path. Entering just behind a chaser gives you its whole circuit as breathing room, while entering just ahead of one is how corners happen.

One jump, three lives

You get one jump per life: press Space or tap to leap over a chaser about to catch you. It's a single use, so treat it like a parachute, an emergency exit you check but hope not to pull. Burning the jump early to grab a few extra segments, then getting cornered with nothing left, is the classic way a run ends. Plan routes that rarely need it and it will be there on the one occasion a circuit genuinely closes on you with no line to escape down. It refreshes when you lose a life, so there's no prize for hoarding it across lives: the only wasted jump is the one you never used before dying.

Coconuts, paint rollers and corners

The arcade original had more going on than you'd guess. Rounds alternated between a gorilla gathering coconuts and a paint roller filling boxes, both hunted along the same ghost-leg lines, and filling the four corner boxes briefly flipped the chase so you could hunt the hunters. That rule taught a generation of players to plot corner-first routes. Released the year after Pac-Man, Amidar offered a stricter kind of maze: no dots to hoover up, just lines to claim, with enemies that follow rules instead of moods. This version keeps the clean heart of it, one grid, one painter, and patrols you can outsmart the moment you stop running and start reading them.