The competition rules state that I must "include the number '29' somewhere 
in the program" (to commemorate it being Arron's birthday). But 
unfortunately, although the number 29 is certainly a very fine thing to have 
as the age for an Arron, it didn't strike me as a particularly useful or 
numerologically significant thing to build into a computer game.

However, since the rules do not specify which number base they are talking 
about, it occurs to me that this could just as well be a reference to the 
hexadecimal value 0x29, which is decimal 41. Admittedly, this number has 
nothing to do with the age of the Arron, or at least won't do for another 
dozen dozens of quartets of weeks, but the rules never actually spell out 
that they are talking about the particular 29 which happens to be his 
current age (they strongly imply that, but I decided to look the other way 
and miss this hint :-)

Now, 0x29, when mapped onto the ASCII character set, refers to the closing 
bracket character, ')'. So in order to comply with the competition rules, I 
have included several of these symbols in my program. In fact, as reported 
by the command:

   sed -e "s/[^)]//g" *.[ch] | tr -d "\n" | wc -c

there are currently no less than ONE THOUSAND AND EIGHTY TWO unique 
occurrences of a twenty nine in this game! This figure is likely to have 
increased even further by the time you get hold of the code, since I haven't 
quite finished writing it yet. And there are four more just in this text 
file, so if you included the documentation in the above search command, that 
would get you up to a total of 1086 different ')' characters! (and since I 
just typed another there, that makes it 1087 (and having opened a bracket to 
interject this, I'm going to have to close it, which makes 1088 (and now 
that I've opened a nested bracket, we are up to 1089 or something, I'm 
losing count here))) (btw. I hope I got the right number of closes there).

I'm tempted to say that this is all a joke :-) except that by doing so, I've 
just bumped up the count one more...