Version 5 of 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://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/davidelizabeth/tcl/plusminus/index.html

Eric Amundsen 02 May 2005

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.

David Easton 02 May 2005

Thanks for the feedback, it can be quite addictive. I now have a fix for all these problems but cannot upload to the website from here. I will try and do it soon. I was aware of the potential for bug #2 but never saw it happen so hadn't fixed it! The written rules allow pieces to be moved back to the start, but our family had never played it that way.

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