Nimix 🏄🪶

A beach-themed take on the ancient game of Nim — play misère Nim against an unbeatable AI, right in your browser.

 

What is Nim?

Nim is one of the oldest strategy games in the world. Nimix is the misère variant, played on the beach with birds:

• The birds start in four rows of 1, 3, 5 and 7.
• On your turn, remove any number of birds — but all from a single row.
• Press End turn and the surfing computer answers.
• Whoever is forced to take the very last bird loses.

The secret is the nim-sum (the XOR of the row sizes). Perfect play keeps handing your opponent a nim-sum of zero — the AI on Perfect mode knows it, so it can't be beaten from the standard start. Switch to Easy for a fighting chance!

Features

• 🧠 Optimal misère AI — a real nim-sum strategy, not a random mover.
• 🎚️ Difficulty toggle — Perfect (unbeatable) or Easy (beatable).
• 🏄 Auto-playing opponent — the surfer responds on its own after you end your turn.
• 🌤️ Day / Dusk / Night themes — change the time of day on the beach.
• 📖 In-game "How to play" — learn the rules and the strategy.
• ⌨️ Keyboard support — Enter ends your turn, N starts a new game.
• 📱 Responsive — plays on phones, tablets and desktops.
• 🍦 Zero dependencies — plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript (the original used jQuery).

Play locally

It's a static site — no build step. Clone and open index.html, or serve the folder:

git clone https://github.com/DanMat/Nimix.git
cd Nimix
python3 -m http.server 8000   # then visit http://localhost:8000

How it works

• js/game.js — the game engine: turn state machine, board rendering, and the misère-Nim AI (bestMove).
• css/style.css — the animated beach backdrop (pure CSS), the board, themes and overlays.
• images/ — the birds, clouds, waves and the surfing computer.

Credits

Rebuilt in vanilla JavaScript from the original 2011 jQuery version. Artwork and the surfing-computer mascot are from the original game.

License

MIT © DanMat