FoxCards: Hearts, Spider, Klondike
This is a collection of the three card games I like to play from time to time. The oldest is Hearts, I think I made it around 2001, Spider and Klondike were mede later in the "zero" years. Get the sources here or find some instruction on how to compile further down the page.
Hearts
The rules of this game are well explained in "Rules for my favorite version of Hearts" (Link now seems to be broken). I especially like the variant "Omnibus Hearts" which is summarized here:
Every card of Hearts is worth 1 point, the Queen of Spades is worth 13 points while the Jack of Diamonds counts -10. (By the way, the aim of the game is to have as little points as possible). Before the game starts you exchange 3 cards with another player. The player with the 2 of Clubs begins a new round, the other players have to follow suit (if possible). In the first round you must not play a card that is worth points and you must not begin a new round with a card of Hearts unless someone has played Hearts already. BUT: If a player gets all Hearts and the Queen of Spades, he "shot the moon"; then all other players get 26 points.
For Linux I found only xhearts (from 1994!), but I did not get it compiled on my system. So I took the sources of xhearts (thanks to Bob Ankeney, Mike Yang, Don Baccus and Jeff Hemmerling), removed the network support and made a new GUI with the FOX toolkit. It works and is fun to play.
See here for a screenshot
Spider
This is more or less a clone of the old Spider game that comes along with most Linux distributions and is also part of XPAT2. However, I like the idea of playing it with fewer than all four suits. In this version you can freely choose with how many different suits you want to play. Restricting them is far less frustrating than playing with all four of them :-)
Please note that the cards are not automatically moved to the stack when you put all 12 of them in a row. Only a click with the right mouse button does it.
The help is not very intuitive, but it works. Something like this is shown permanently below the cards:
"< B> -> Ea" i.e. "I am row B and I fit into row E (rank and suit) or into row a (rank only)"
It is possible to save and/or load games, even to view an animation of a successful one. If you think that it is impossible to solve a spider game, here are two sets of cards that prove the opposite: a game with two suits and one with three suits. Just load them and replay them using the "File" menu.
See here for a screenshot
Klondike
under construction
Downloads:
Foxcards requires the FOX Toolkit, which you find here. It was developped with Fox-1.4 but lately I only use the developper version Fox-1.7 (at the time of writing it is 1.7.67) with which it will compile well. This is the source code.
If you have any questions or comments just mail me.