How to play TacTickle

     You and your opponent take turns moving your pieces around the board.  During a turn, a piece can only move sideways by one square.  To win, you must be the first to line up a certain number of your pieces.  (you specify this in the Game Options dialog, see below)
     To move a piece, first click on it.  The spots that you can move to will then be highlighted.  To move the piece to one of these spots, click on it.  To avoid moving the piece, click on any un-highlighted square.

The Game Options Dialog

     This dialog allows you to specify how the game will be won.  First, you can change the number of aligned pieces required to win.  You can specify any number from 2 up to the number of available pieces.  You can also specify along which directions the pieces must be aligned.

Credits

     The original game was apparently developed by COMEX at the University of Southern California (USC).  It was modified by A.R. Balian who taught the “Count Mathula” summer course at the California Museum of Science and Industry.  I modified it some more by adding the options in the Game Options Dialog, and, of course, I wrote the program.

Registration

     If you have any suggestions for improving this program, please let me know.  If you haven't paid for the program, please do so.  It took a lot of effort to get the program to work, so a contribution of US$5 or more will be greatly appreciated.
     I'll be happy to send you a list of my other programs if you want me to.  I also do custom programming, in case you need a program that will do something special.

     My address is:

     John Lindal
     P.O. Box 4092
     Point Dume, CA  90264
     USA

     My E-mail address is:

     jafl@alice.wonderland.caltech.edu

Disclaimer

     I have tried to debug this program on all the common Macs.  However, I can’t guarantee that it will work with all systems.  If the program does crash, send me a letter telling me how it happened (error messages and numbers are very useful!), and I’ll try to fix the problem.
     Please don't feel that you have to pay for the program before you report a problem.  (But it wouldn't hurt.)  I'm more interested in fixing bugs and getting new ideas than getting paid for the program.

Bugs Fixed from Previous Versions

1)  Rhys Hollows discovered that, if you shrink the game window a lot while a game is in progress, the cursor will not be an arrow outside of the window.  It's not his fault that I'm too lazy to fix it.

2)  Lloyd Wood pointed out that the fonts in my program were interfering with the system’s fonts.