5000 - This is a 2 to 4 player dice game. The players can be any combination of people or Palm. It is played with 6 dice. Players take turns rolling the dice and pulling out point dice and rolling the remaining dice again. The idea is to roll as much as you can to accumulate points without getting a bad roll. A bad roll is when you have no points in the rolled dice. When this happens you forfeit your turn and your points for that turn. As the amount of dice that you roll goes down the chance of getting a bad roll goes up. A player must get 750 points to start the game. Also, if the player uses all 6 dice he must roll again to "make it good".
The demo has no time limit and may be freely distributed. It has no nag screens and is fully functional. However, in the demo the preferences can not be changed. The demo is limited to a play to score of 5000, 2 players, make it good turned on, palm speed slow, and sound off. When you play against the Palm in demo it does play slow. But this gives you time to see what the Palm is doing. In the registered version when set to fast speed the Palm plays so fast that you can not really see what it is doing. I assure you though that the Palm does not cheat.
The registered Palm version of 5000 allows you to have from 2 to 4 players. Any number of those players can be the Palm. However, if you set all of the players to the Palm you will have to let the game play until it is over.
If you are in the middle of a game and you want to do something else on the Palm you can. When you go back to the game it will return you to where you left off.
I had never heard of this game from anyone other than my wife. However, after I stated developing this game I did a little bit of research and found out that there are many variations. Here is a short list of similar games: 10,000, Cosmic Wipout, Zilch, Farkle, Keepers, and Bupkis. I realize that others may not play 5000 the same way that we do. The demo version of 5000 plays exactly the way my wife played it as a child, and the way we prefer to play it today. Yet, there are a few options in the registered version to allow the game to play a little differently.
After seeing the review bellow by Gordon I thought that maybe my use of the Palm random generator was not giving a good random sampling. So I did some calculations and ran some tests. When you have six dice the odds of getting 3 pair are 1 in 21; the odds for a straight are 1 in 65. I ran test dice rolls using the code in 5000 and running on my Palm. With test runs of 1000 and 10000 rolls I was getting very close to the correct odds. Even with runs of 100 the odds are not way out of line. I think the problem is a matter of perception. When you are playing this game on the Palm you can go through a lot of rolls very quickly. It appears like you are getting more good dice rolls then you should.
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Supported operating systems:
Palm OS 4.x, Palm OS 5.x
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