“Eat cells smaller than you and don’t get eaten by the bigger ones.” This simple, one-line rulebook is all you need to know about the free-to-play Agar. As you might (or might not) guess from the title, you take charge of a small cell in a huge petri dish which is full of other players. The aim is simple: consume bits of food and subsequently other players in an effort to grow bigger and potentially become the largest cell in the dish.
“Eat cells smaller than you and don’t get eaten by the bigger ones”
The beauty of this highly addictive game is its simplicity. Eat the small, avoid the big. Yet I guarantee you will be coming back again and again to try and get on that top 10 leader board. Let’s start from the beginning. As you hit ‘begin’ you are thrown into the game world as the smallest possible cell, with a mass of around fifteen. The only real option here is to flee to the corners, farm on the scatterings of food and gain mass as quickly as possible. Then the choices begin: do you stay in these corners and purely eat small foods, or do you risk entering the centre of the map and try to consume other players?
As you grow, so does the amount of strategy needed to survive. Perhaps you can hide under the various viruses that also populate the dish: friends whilst you are small but liabilities when you are large. Using the spacebar to split up your mass can help attack other players but a poorly timed attack will leave you completely vulnerable to other nearby cells. Advanced tactics including firing out bits of mass with ‘W’ into viruses in the hope that they will be catapulted into (and thereby break up) larger cells.
As you grow, so does the amount of strategy needed to survive
In Agar it is all about the small things. Certain names for your cells give them amusing identifying skins. And margins for error or success are deliberately vague. Is your cell just about large enough to avoid consumption by that one? Will splitting up my mass to consume another player expose me too much?
If you aren’t on a swanky internship, or even if you are, give Agar a go to pass the time. What’s the worst that can happen?
Agar is playable for free here.
Tom Welshman
Featured image: youtube.com
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