Copyright: CreateHelp! {Unregisterd} ® Nic Barnes 1993


Welcome to Dragon Solitaire!
Welcome to Leapfrog!

Disclaimer

System Requirements

Overview of Leapfrog

Menus and Mouse Buttons

Playing Leapfrog

Registration Information

Credits


Disclaimer

DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY

THIS SOFTWARE AND MANUAL ARE SOLD "AS IS" AND WITHOUT WARRANTIES AS TO PERFORMANCE OR MERCHANTABILITY OR ANY OTHER WARRANTIES WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.  BECAUSE OF THE VARIOUS HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE ENVIRONMENTS INTO WHICH THIS PROGRAM MAY BE PUT, NO WARRANTY OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE IS OFFERED.  GOOD DATA PROCESSING PROCEDURE DICTATES THAT ANY PROGRAM BE THOROUGHLY TESTED WITH NON-CRITICAL DATA BEFORE USING IT.  THE USER MUST ASSUME THE ENTIRE RISK FOR USING THE PROGRAM.   ANY LIABILITY OF THE SELLER WILL BE LIMITED EXCLUSIVELY TO PRODUCT REPLACEMENT OR REFUND OF PURCHASE PRICE.


System Requirements

At minimum, in addition to about 500K of disk space you will need a mouse with at least two buttons and an EGA card connected to a color monitor.  This would be minimal indeed, since Leapfrog is designed for VGA.  However it has been tested in EGA mode and is playable, although the pictures are distorted both in dimension and color.

16-color VGA is quite playable and will not produce dimensional distortion of the pictures;  however you'll still be missing a lot of detail and subtlety in the images since the 256-color palette used to create them must be mapped to the 16 default system colors.

If you are running in 256-color mode you will get much the nicest rendering of the pictures, as the tokens were designed using a 256-color palette.  These days most standard VGA monitors and video cards are capable of at least 256-color support.  Usually, a set of Windows drivers is supplied on a utilities disk that comes with the video card.  We strongly recommend that you go through the exercise of  locating the appropriate driver (most likely 640 x 480 x 256-colors) and installing it via the Windows Setup program.  This can be a bit of a hassle the first time, but once the driver is successfully installed, it's easy to use Setup to go back and forth between 16 and 256 color modes from then on.  (But you won't want to once you've seen 256-color mode.)


Overview of Dragon Solitaire
Overview of Leapfrog

Leapfrog is a challenging and addictive solitaire game which is often played with a deck of cards, although other types of tokens such as tiles can also be used.  All that's important to the game itself is that each token (card, tile, or whatever) is uniquely identified by the combination of two characteristics.  In the case of a standard deck of cards, these would be the suit and rank.

Briefly, the game consists of dealing out the tokens and then re-combining them into piles according to the rules of play.  The goal is to end up with as few piles as possible.  In many cases, even if you play optimally, you will not be able to play all the tokens and end up with only one pile.

Provisions are made within the mouse functions for dealing and moving tokens.  The main menu and Game provide capabilities to start or restart a game, and to undo a move.  Scrolling is in general handled automatically, but manual scroll buttons are activated on the menu bar when appropriate.

Now, check out the details of how to play and have a ball!

See also:

Menus and Mouse Buttons

PlayingLeapfrog


Menus and Mouse Buttons

The Mouse

 While tokens remain to be dealt, you will see a special token which indicates the position of the deck.  Clicking the left mouse button on the deck token will cause one token to be dealt.  Clicking the right button will cause enough tokens to be dealt to fill the remainder of the screen.

When moving tokens from one pile to another, click the left button on the token to be moved and drag it until it is in contact with the token on which it is to be placed.  If you are playing it to a legal location, releasing the left button will cause it to remain in the new location, else it will return to its former location.

The Game Menu

The Game menu provides the following options:

New            Shuffles the deck and starts a new game

Restart       Restarts the current game without re-shuffling

Exit              Exits Dragon Solitaire and returns you to wherever you came from

About...       Invokes a nice-looking dialog box

Help            Invokes the help file you're currently reading

The Options Menu

Difficulty

When Leapfrog is played with a full deck of 52 tokens (4 "suits", 13 "ranks" in each), wins are quite rare.  The "Set Difficulty" dialog box allows those of you who are more into instant gratification to improve your odds of winning a game by decreasing the number of "suits" and/or "ranks".

The Undo Function

Selecting Undo on the menu bar causes your last move to be undone.  A complete history is kept, so you could keep undoing single moves back to the beginning of the game.  However, Game/Restart (see above) would get you back to the beginning quicker.

The Scroll Functions

The Up and Down arrows on the far right side of the menu bar provide manual scrolling of one row of tokens at a time.  They are activated or greyed automatically as appropriate.  Scrolling Up means that you are moving the display backwards toward the first pile.  Scrolling Down means that you are moving the display toward the current location of the undealt tokens.  It should not be necessary to do much manual scrolling, since the program scrolls automatically when appropriate.


Playing Dragon Solitaire
Playing Leapfrog

Object of the Game

The object is to end up with as few piles as possible, or alternatively stated, to make as many plays as possible.

Ending the Game

The game is over when you decide it is, usually when you run out of legal plays and have tried Undos and Restarts to your heart's content.  Normally, you indicate that you are finished by selecting either Game/New or Game/Exit from the menu.  Only in the case of a win (1 pile left) does the program auto-detect the end of a game.

Dealing

You may deal as many tokens as you like before making a play.  There is no requirement to play as soon as possible.  In fact your maximum information is available if you deal out all the tokens before making any plays at all.

Legal Plays

A legal play consists of dragging a token either one or three positions backwards and dropping it on another token of either the same suit or same rank.  Positions are considered to increase from left to right and from top to bottom, so backwards means toward the upper left token on the screen.  There is no ordering imposed on legal plays; you may skip around at will.

Example:

In this example you could deal a token, else there are three legal plays:

1)  The blue lighthouse on the black lighthouse,

2)  The black tree on the purple tree, or

3)  The black tree on the black hummingbird.

Note that the black hummingbird cannot be played on the black lighthouse in this example since there is only one intervening token.


Registration Information

Registration gets you the official release of Leapfrog.  This includes a version of the program which can pick a token set from a library along with at least one new token set to start you off.  Additional token sets will be uploaded to your favorite bulletin board as fast as Ella cranks them out, but only the registered version will be able to make use of them.

To become a registered Leapfrogger, send $10 cash or money order (no personal checks, please) along with your mailing address to:

WORDCRAFT

6161 El Cajon Blvd., #145

San Diego, CA  92115

We prefer to ship Leapfrog on a 5.25" floppy disk (they're cheaper!), but will supply 3.5" format on request.


Credits

Leapfrog Solitaire is brought to you by the friendly folks at Penguin Programs:

                            Paul Henson      Packaging and Moral Support

                            Ella Hobson       Graphics Design

                            Rick Lones        Programming

We're just some fun-loving friends who believe there is a demand for high quality programs which incorporate SVGA graphics.  Leapfrog is a solitaire game which we've watched Ella play for years with cards, but which we've never seen elsewhere.  It's our first offering to the shareware market and if the response is encouraging we'll do something fancier next time.  Watch for our icon!


Ella Hobson - Shy, maidenly ballet dancer and ironworker.


Paul Henson -  3-wall handball legend and rapidly improving computer user.


Rick Lones -  Never wanted to work for a living anyway.