Anyone who did not grow up in the Merrimack Valley
area
likely has never heard of the card game 45s.
But if you did grow up in the Merrimack Valley, you probably
played
nothing but 45s at family get-togethers and parties.
If you were really serious about it, you
could even play in 45s tournaments at Elks or Moose Lodges, Knights of
Columbus
halls, or various social clubs.
My Googling and Wikipedia checking failed to definitively determine the origins of 45s, although consensus seems to be that the game originated in Canada. We will probably never know how 45s made its way to the Merrimack Valley and became entrenched as the local card game of choice.
The rules of 45s are so convoluted that any
attempt to teach
someone the game typically results in their calling the game “stupid”
or worse
names followed by a suggestion to just play Crazy Eights or Oh Hell or
some
other game. Given that I have lived in
Florida since 1989, I haven’t played 45s much and definitely miss it.
Given the colloquialism of 45s, I was surprised to
find a
45s game that I could actually install and play on my phone. I was pretty excited to try it out. As it turns out, the app I found was pretty
awful. In addition to crappy
implementation of how the bidding and play take place, the players the
app gave
you to play with and against were absolutely terrible.
They made crazy bids and countless
errors, like playing second-man high. I
couldn’t imagine the abuse these AI players would have gotten from my
aunts,
uncles and cousins if they somehow played at one our family gatherings. After a while, I deleted the 45s app because
I could win almost every time—even when I played partners, meaning I
would have
to play with someone as stupid as our opponents.
At some point, I had the idea that I could write
my own 45s
program that would be superior to the one I had downloaded. I figured it would be fun to try to write some
C++ code that plays 45s, plus doing it might help keep my brain working
a bit.
Of course, with all the other stuff I’ve been
doing, I was
never just going to sit down all day and work on this program like a
full-time
job. I figured I would work on the
program here and there, whenever I felt like it, meaning it would
likely become
a multi-year effort. In other words, my
work ethic on this project would be similar to that of a government
employee.
So I got started on this 45s project sometime in
spring of
2022 (not sure when) with a planned end-date of maybe sometime before
the end
of the decade. Watch this space for
updates, but don’t hold your breath waiting for them.
The first version of my 45s program is,
admittedly, not
great. All it lets you do is play a
4-person partners game where you play all the hands.
You can do a few things like give the players
names or see all the cards all the time, if you like (I use this mode
for
debugging).
In the future, I hope to make this into a game you
can play
on the internet with players playing from anywhere, but that’s a ways
off! I also want to add the ability to
play 6-player
and cutthroat games. That’s also a ways
off. Finally, I’d like to add computer
players
(that don’t suck) so you can play 45s by yourself without having to
play all
the hands. That is very, very far off. Someday I might also like to get this to run
on something other than Windows computers, but that might be in another
lifetime.
For now, you can download beta (i.e. experimental,
likely
guaranteed to not work) version 1.0 by clicking the button below. Because you are downloading an executable
image (.exe file), your security software will likely warn that you are
downloading something that could erase your hard drive, send all your
financial
information to Russia and maybe set your house on fire.
It won’t do any of that. It’ll just
play 45s.
I have an instruction, or “Help,”
file that explains how to
use the program. You can read it by
clicking here or download it by clicking
the button below.
Download Help File
The file(s) will get saved wherever your browser
normally stores
files that you download from the internet (I can’t control where they
go). In Windows, that is usually your
Downloads
folder. After you download the program
and help file, you can copy them anywhere, such as your desktop (copy
both to
the same place). After that, just double
click on the program file to run it, as you would any other program. No installation is required.
If you do download and try it, I’d like to hear
about any
problems you find as well as general comments.
45s forever!
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