Tesserae is a single-player computer game developed by Nicholas Schlott based on Ken Brewster's DOS game Stained Glass [1] and published by Inline Design in 1990 for the Macintosh.
Tesserae is played by flipping colored tiles over other tiles to remove them from the board. While flipping over tiles subtracts the color from the tile that was jumped, landing on a tile adds the colors, making it more difficult for that tile to be removed. Primary tiles of red, blue and yellow combine to produce secondary tiles of purple, green and orange. A gray tile is produced by combining all three primary tiles. Game play starts simple with only primary tiles on a rectangular board. More complex board shapes as well as introducing secondary tiles increases the difficulty.
The game was also published for the Game Boy and Game Gear handhelds by GameTek, developed by Eurocom.
In 2011, coinciding with the opening of Apple's Mac App Store, Aki's Playware released Tesserae 20th Anniversary Edition for the Mac. This new release revives Tesserae on its original platform with modern graphics and new features, including a dynamic tournament scoreboard on the main window. Players can replay mosaics to improve their tournament scores and trophies.
In 2009, Aki's Playware acquired the rights to Tesserae and revived the game on the iPhone platform. And in 2010, Aki's Playware released a more complete and accurate revival, Tesserae HD for the iPad. Kudit had previously developed the first iPhone clone Mosaic on October 11, 2007 as had Pixlers developed the iPhone clone WORP, on June 7, 2009.