DICECRASH II: DICE RACK OVERVIEW Dice Rack is a game for the TI 99/4A home computer, created by Keith Bergman. It is a sequel to the 2015 game “Dicecrash.” It is written in Extended BASIC, and requires that cartridge and 32K memory expansion. It is one self-contained program and should run from any disk drive, and from any emulator or “stock” TI 99/4A system. OBJECT To arrange dice in vertical ‘hands’ in a 5x5 rack to score enough points to meet a set goal. INTRODUCTION The Dealer welcomes you to Dice Rack! The Dice Rack is a 5x5 grid with gates you can open. Dice drop into the Rack one at a time. You have limited control of where they go, and you can open gates to let them fall further down in the rack. You score points by building hands VERTICALLY – pairs, straights, full houses, three, four, even five of a kind. At the same time, any hands you come up with HORIZONTALLY will count AGAINST your total score at the end. The Dealer will talk to you throughout the game, and will assign you a point goal for each round. It starts out around 100, though The Dealer’s been known to pad it by a few points when he’s feeling ornery. Each time a die is ready to fall into the Rack, you have the option to shift its position one (and only one) column to the left or right, or to leave it where it is. You can “wrap around” – move from position 1 to position 5, or vice versa – but you cannot move more than one column before the die falls. This becomes especially important when the columns fill up later in the round. You also have the option to open one of the 20 gates in the Rack. Letters will appear by each one, and you select the corresponding letter to open the gate. You can select any gate at any time. If you pick one that’s already open, it will close, allowing you a small amount of control over creating hands and “blocking” horizontal scores. If you open a gate, any dice above it will fall down into the next row of the Rack. After this, the die falls until it hits a closed gate, or the bottom of the Rack, and the next die is lined up. The player is always shown the next die up, as well, to help with strategy in placing dice. If you completely fill a column with five dice, the bottom-most die will fall into the Red Row below your Rack, and the dice above it will drop down to fill the empty space. This die no longer counts in your score, and is not in your Rack. In addition, your goal will increase by TWICE that die’s value. (For example, if your original goal was 104 points, and a 5 falls into the Red Row, your new goal is 114.) Once a column shifts down from a die falling into the Red Row, it cannot shift down further. The topmost spot in the column is open and a die can be placed there. You have no control over the bottom gates – they cannot be opened or closed by you. If a die falls when the topmost spot is full, and it has nowhere to go, it “falls out of the rack” and is shown on the right side of the screen. Dice that fall out in this way add THREE TIMES their face value to your goal. (For example, if your goal is 110, and a 6 falls out of the rack, your goal would increase to 128.) After 25 dice have fallen, the round is over, and your scores – both vertical and horizontal – are tallied. You score points even if a row or column is not full – for instance, if there are three fives and two empty spaces in a column, you still get credit for three of a kind. The score of your dice tallied horizontally is deducted from your score vertically, and the result is your total score for the round. If it meets your goal, it is added to your scoreboard at the bottom, and you are invited to play another round. If not, the game is over. Scores for hands: 1 Pair – face value of dice (a pair of threes = 6 points) 2 Pairs –2x face value of dice (a pair of twos and a pair of fours = 24 points) 3 Of a Kind – 3x face value of dice (three sixes = 54 points) 4 of a kind = 4x face value of dice (four four’s = 64 points) 5 of a kind = 10x face value of dice (five 2’s = 100 points) Straight (1-2-3-4-5 or 2-3-4-5-6) = 50 points Small straight (four in a row) – 25 points Full house (3 of a kind + a pair) = 75 points STRATEGY TIPS Due to full columns settling and dice falling into the Red Row, it’s impossible to build a perfect 5x5 Rack full of all the dice that fall. Planning for some racks to be less full, and letting other dice fall to the Red Row, has to be part of your plan. If you fill up one or two columns early, it may be hard to move one column at a time quickly enough to get later dice into clear spaces in the Rack. Try not to corner yourself, and have a couple different options in mind in case you don’t roll the dice you need to complete a hand. Letting dice fall out of the Rack is not generally recommended, but there may be times that keeping one die out of the Rack will let you build a lucrative hand with the next one that comes up, or will stop that one die from wrecking a hand you already built. Consider all the possibilities before you decide to open a gate and give it room, or potentially let it fall out and increase your goal. NOTES I came up with the idea of the Dice Rack while procrastinating on finishing Enemy Lines, a game I’ve been wrestling with off and on for a decade. A friend of mine coding game apps on modern systems was entering some 48-hour “game jams” to spark his creativity, and, frustrated by trying to decipher my own decade-old code, I decided to cleanse my palate with a quick new project. I got the Rack set up, but realized I needed some kind of opponent, because I wasn’t about to program full AI for this quick game. After a few false starts, the idea of the player essentially battling themselves – trying to avoid making hands one way while getting points in the other direction – came to me. I didn’t knock it out in forty-eight hours, but it’s been about three weeks from the very beginning to release. Thanks for reading, and for playing the game. Keep an eye out for Enemy Lines, it’s coming soon and hopefully it will be worth the wait. Keith Bergman Toledo, Ohio, USA May 29, 2020