Plus and Minus
David Easton 05 Jan 2005
Plus and Minus was a board game for 4 people from 1940s or earlier.
This version allows you to pit your skills against fairly skillful computer players.
It is freely available from: http://www.easton.me.uk/tcl/plusminus/index.html
HJG 2005-06-02 Sorry - "Temporarily Unavailable" DPE 2005-06-07 Now on a higher bandwidth server.
Change History
Version 0.5 09 May 2005
- Scores are shown for up to 12 previous rounds.
- Reduced size of playing area from 660x662 to 600x600
Version 0.4 03 May 2005
- Added arrows to show whose turn it is
- Players take it in turn to start a round
- Fixed bugs reported by Eric Amundsen: There are no longer any situations in which there are no possible moves. A move that would result in moving backward beyond zero, leaves the piece on zero.
- Fixed bug reported by Eric Amundsen: Scores are shown for up to 8 previous rounds. This prevents the scorecard growing so long that a new round cannot be started.
LES: Hmmm... I usually play 12 rounds. :-( More or less 20 scorecard lines fit fine in my 800x600 screen. The lower card row doesn't, though. It is always completely invisible. And I have to push the window way to the top, hiding the entire title bar. I wish everything were a bit smaller. DPE: See version 0.5 :-)
Version 0.3 31 Dec 2004
- First public release
Eric Amundsen 02 May 2005 (Comments on v0.3)
My wife has recently become addicted to this game and has reported a few bugs to me, I thought I'd post them here as I couldn't find an email address for David Easton.
* bug #1 ... on the first round of a hand... if a player plays a large negative card and the next player doesn't play a card large enough to result in a positive sum, an error message is displayed and play comes to a grinding halt
* bug #2 ... if a player has one marker on 11 and the other markers at 25 or zero... and the player before plays a -9 ... and the player only has a -5 left in his hand... the marker can only move to 11, but there's already a marker in that place... an error message is displayed and play comes to a grinding halt
* bug/feature #3 ... not really a bug but really inconvenient... after a certain number of hands, the score display box gets so long that the buttons at the bottom have scrolled off the screen and are unreachable (can't click "next round" meaning the game is automatically over)
#1 and #2 are probably the same bug - basically if the only move left is unallowed, then play is over :(
I'll probably unwrap the tclkit and fix them myself for my wife, but I couldn't find any license, just a copyright, so I won't post any changes unless I hear from the author.
DPE Thanks for the feedback, I've fixed these problems in version 0.4
US 1. July 2005
Thanks for this nice game. Here's a small patch to mark the leading player of each round. Maybe you like it:
*** plusminus-gui.tcl.org 2005-05-09 13:42:50.000000000 +0200
--- plusminus-gui.tcl 2005-07-01 23:23:10.000000000 +0200
***************
*** 180,185 ****
--- 180,193 ----
set rmin 1
}
+ set max [max $Scores(total,1) $Scores(total,2) $Scores(total,3) $Scores(total,4)]
+ set Scores($Scores(numRounds),winners) [list]
+ foreach p [list 1 2 3 4] {
+ if {$Scores(total,$p) == $max} {
+ lappend Scores($Scores(numRounds),winners) $p
+ }
+ }
+
for {set r $rmin} {$r <= $Scores(numRounds)} {incr r} {
set max [max $Scores($r,1) $Scores($r,2) $Scores($r,3) $Scores($r,4)]
***************
*** 194,199 ****
--- 202,210 ----
if {$Scores($r,$p) == $max} {
$f.r${r}p${p} configure -fg red
}
+ if {[lsearch -exact $Scores($r,winners) $p] != -1} {
+ $f.r${r}p${p} configure -bg MistyRose
+ }
}
}There seems to exist a sporadic bug. From time to time a round is counted twice. I was not able to reproduce it. I still don't know the reason. Perhaps you do.
Thanks again, now going back to play another combat of Plus and Minus.
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