Kaliko Online

Kaliko is a tiling game. Each player gets a hand of seven hexagonal tiles, each marked with three colored path segments joining its sides. One tile is placed on the board to start the game. To make a turn, the player lays down tiles, taking care to match the colors of adjoining sides, and creates a new path that joins two ends already on the board. Scoring is based on the length of the paths created.

You can play here online, but Kaliko is also published in physical form by Kadon Enterprises. The game of Kaliko has several times won a spot in Games Magazine's annual roster of the Top 100 Games of the Year.

The program runs as a Java applet in your browser. It is written with the Sun J2SE (1.3.0) version of Java, and so will not run natively in most browsers. You need to have a 1.3-compatible Java runtime installed; if you're not sure, click here to check or to find out where to download Java (it's free).

In addition, you need a fairly modern browser. Netscape 4.x browsers are not supported, but nearly any other browser in regular usage is. See here for browser support issues.

The game link below will open a new browser window. If JavaScript is enabled, the new window will be sized for your screen, with the toolbars hidden to maximize game space; otherwise, the window will be a normal window. If you are running a popup-window suppressor, the link may not work at all.

(in a new browser window)
Here, you play Kaliko against Chthonic the Quahog, our Kaliko ace.

We have heard of only limited success running Kaliko with browsers under Macintosh OS X. Some browsers are reported to crash when trying to make a move in the game, after initially drawing the applet correctly. Mozilla 1.1, running under OS X 10.1 (Puma) with the MRJPluginCarbon, is reportedly able to run the applet without crashing; however, when a tile is dragged, an image of the entire panel (rather than just a little grey hexagon) is dragged along with the cursor. The game is playable, but it looks weird.
We have no reports whether Apple's latest version Java integrates better with browsers, or if it has corrected the drag-image problem.
At this point, the solution seems to lie with the developers of the Macintosh Java and the Mac browsers. If you discover another browser that runs the applet under any version of OS X, please let us know.