Common Loon Hearts

Common Loon Hearts is the card game hearts. It is written in Free Pascal with the Lazarus IDE. The current version is November 5, 2020.

Features

You can replay a hand to see how making different choices would impact the outcome
You can vary the rate of play, or control it yourself by clicking
You can let the robot play for you (it never tires and will play for hours)
You can reveal the other players' cards - for learning purposes only, of course!
The computer opponents employ a moderately challenging strategy
Ties are recognized
No language dependency - the game play proceeds without text of any kind (but English is used in the information window)
Easy installation/removal, does not scatter files across your computer

There are many deficiencies as well! To name a few:

You can't choose card decks, players, background, etc.
Just one hearts ruleset is employed (2 clubs must be led)
You cannot set the level of intelligence of your computer opponents
The window and cards are not resizeable
The graphic design elements are poor (excepting perhaps the public domain characters I have used)

But I hope you will give it a try and enjoy playing it!

Installation - Linux

Common Loon Hearts comes distributed as a single executable file. It can be found here. Simply download that file to your computer and place it wherever you wish. Go to that directory, and check the md5sum:

9fe9cc199b8d6231e927482f37fe02a3

Make it executable with:

chmod 755 commonloonhearts

Now you can start it from the command line in that directory by typing in a terminal:

./commonloonhearts

Or you can integrate it into your Linux menu system. An icon is provided, but the setup is up to you. The program should work on just about any Linux distribution with the X Window system.

Installation - Windows

The latest Windows executable can be found here. It should work for Windows Vista, 7, 8, 10, and maybe even earlier versions of Windows. Just download it and place wherever you want on your Windows PC. The md5sum is:

3aff0017c2524a60314b0ec979fd59f8

Create a shortcut if you like. You can use the provided icon.

Removing the app

Should you no longer want the program, simply remove that single file. The program does not create any additional files. All the resources it needs (icons, pictures, etc.) are contained within the executable, and they remain there. There are no settings or preferences or hidden files utilized.

Licence

Common Loon Hearts is free software, distributed under the GNU Public Licence, version 2. Source can be found at GitHub.

Other games

You may be interested in Common Loon Solitaire, an implementation of Patience for impatient people.

Last revised: 2021.02.17 Send me a comment home