Towers Help Index
Towers V1.1 Help Index

Help on any aspect of this patience game can be selected from the index below:-

Towers Rules

Playing the Game

How the Scoring works

Menu Commands

Game "Features"/Credits/Version History


Towers Rules

Towers is a Windows  implementation of a solitaire game sometimes known as Seahaven Towers, which I originally saw as a shareware game for the Macintosh and X windows systems. Towers is a fairly blatent rip-off of that game.

The game is played using an ordinary deck of cards.  The cards are all face-up; you always know where all of the cards are.  At any time, each card is in one of three kinds of stacks:

Playing stacks.	There are ten of these, each initially having five cards.

Working stacks. 	There are four of these, two of them initially having a card in them.  Each working stack is allowed to contain at most one card.

Ace stacks.	There are four of these, one for each suit.  They are initially empty.  Cards must be placed in these stacks in ascending order, starting with the ace.  The object of the game is to get all the cards in the ace stacks.

The rules are simple.  You may only move one card at a time; only a card in a working stack or on the top of a playing stack may be moved. A card may be moved to the top of a playing stack only if it is the same suit that was on top there and the next lower card.  (In other words, you may only place the seven of spades on top of the eight of spades.)  A card may be moved to any empty working stack.  And a card may be moved to an ace stack if it is an ace or if it is the next higher card than the one that is already there.


PlayingTowers

To move a card, just drag it with the left mouse button.  When you let go, it will be placed on the stack that the card was moved closest to, if such a move is legal.  If the move is not legal, the card will spring back to its original location.

Since it is always to your advantage to move cards to the ace stacks as soon as possible, cards will be automatically moved there for you.

There is also a convenient shortcut: you may move several cards at once from one playing stack to another, providing that such a move would be possible using available empty work stacks.

Since there is no hidden information in the game, it's not quite cheating to provide an undo command.  There is an undo option on the move menu which will back-up one card move. There us also a replay option which will let you start the hand from scratch.


Towers Scoring

If you get all the cards into the ace piles, you will be scored a win. If you select the Give Up option from the Game menu , you will be scored a loss.  It's as simple as that!!

 Your wins and losses will be remembered across invocations of towers. The game also keeps track of the number of games lost and won in a row (so you can see how REALLY badly you're doing). Your current score can be obtained by choosing Score... from the Game menu.


Menu Commands
Towers Menu Commands

Select the menu you are interested in:-

Game Menu

Move MenuTOWERS_MM


Game Menu

Give Up	Abort the current game and start a new one. This will score as a loss, so don't give up unless you have to!

Replay Hand	Start the current hand again (ie. reset all the card positions). There is no penalty for doing this.

Score	Display your current scores. The game keeps track of the number of games played, how many of those were completed (ie. won) and your winning and losing statistics.

Reset Scores	Reset all game scores back to zero. Do this to stop ofhers finding out how badly you've been playing.

Exit	Quit Towers.


Move Menu

Undo	Undo the last move. Towers has an (almost) infinite undo stack and so any move or series of moves can be undone.


Features
Game "Features"/Credits/Version History

Three Card Sizes	Will choose a card size depending on the window size. Currently, the three card sizes mean the whole table will fit in a window 320, 640 or 800 pixels across.

Casual Court Cards	The smallest card set has all court cards in casual dress.

Version History

V1.0	Initial Shareware release.

V1.1	Undo stack is saved when the current game is saved.
Accelerators have been added and are Windows 3.1 "friendly".
Now uses SP-CARDS.DLL instead of CARDS.DLL to fix a name clash with Windows for Workgroups V3.11
Uses CTL3D.DLL for 3D controls.

Thanks to:-

Solitare for the cards/card back.

Gary,Rob and everyone in the IV-Lab for game testing.

Sun Microsystems (again), for introducing me to the game, and for a little of the documentation.

Ian Heath

ih@uk.ac.soton.ecs (JANET) or ih@ecs.soton.ac.uk (BITNET)