NELIKKO (terminal)

Helsinki, 1989, in a terminal. The second version of the game beside web/, on the magmacrunch engine's terminal backend: a cabinet in the magmacrunch arcade and its own command, the same either way.

pipx install magmacrunch-nelikko
nelikko

For working on it:

pip install -e ".[dev]"
python -m nelikko

Keys

Every control is a press, so a terminal plays this the way a browser does. Holding an arrow is the terminal repeating it, which stands in for the browser's own auto-shift; it starts a little later than the page's 170 ms, and that is the only difference you can feel.

It is the browser's game

nelikko/rules.py is the rules from web/game.js, which keeps them in one file with the canvas and the page. tests/test_oracle.py checks the port anyway: tools/js_oracle.mjs loads web/game.js unmodified with the page stubbed out, plays it through its own update(), and the test replays every op through the port and requires the same well, piece, score, level and clock after each one. Ten games, about 25,000 ops, up to level 20.

Both versions share a scoreboard, so a rule changes in web/game.js and here together, and the oracle test holds the two to each other. Two oddities this port used to copy were fixed in both on 2026-10-19: levels 2 and 3 fell slower than level 1, and a piece swapped out of hold entered over the stack.

Scores go to the board the browser already has, which is still called tetris from before the rename. That is deliberate (see ../AGENTS.md) and never shown.

Characters

Every glyph is in the engine's degradation table except the Finnish ä in PIDÄ and the tagline. cp1252 and cp437 both carry it, so in practice it draws everywhere; what it lacks is an ASCII stand-in under --ascii. The engine's nordic group (magmacrunch-media/magmacrunch#4) adds one. Once a release carries it, raise the magmacrunch floor here and drop FINNISH from tests/test_app.py.

Needs a 52x22 terminal.

Licence

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0, as the rest of this repository. See NOTICE.