Oddity in the Pyramid UI
zudensternen
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I started playing Pyramid recently. Fun game, moves faster than Freecell or Klondike or certainly than Seahaven Towers. One odd thing I noticed: when the board shows a pair adding up to 13, one of which is in one of the two stacks above and one in the pyramid below, clicking on the one below does not move them to the foundation; only a click on the topmost one does that. When both parts of the 13-pair are either above or below, clicking on either one does the job. @jim / @david, is this a deliberate design choice, and if so why? Seems to me it would be a useful affordance, in the case that there happened to be two of the 13-mates visible below, to choose which one went to the foundation.
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Hi Zudenstermen, I've noticed this too. It would be useful to have but in the case of two 13-mates, you can drag the top card to its mate of your choosing.
Thank you @klick! Didn't know that. That answers the practicality of my question; all that remains is aesthetic.
It's more of a detail about how the rules are coded. Internally every game is a collection of "piles". Each pile has rules about what can be dragged from it and what can be dropped onto it. When you just click (or tap) a card, it's internally figuring out the "best" place to drag that card and then acting like you dragged it there.
In pyramid, the main pyramid is 28 separate piles (the tableau). You can drag a card onto one of those pile only if the 2 cards add to 13 (and the pile is not covered by another card). Once the card is dropped, instead of adding that card to the pile, it instead redirects both cards to the discard pile. The "stock" and the "waste" are also piles. The waste only allows cards to be dropped if they originated from the stock. The stock doesn't allow any cards to be dropped on it. So that's why you can't match a card to the stock or waste by dragging a card from the tableau and dropping it on them.
We could in theory do what you are asking. In fact I just tested and it wasn't too hard. Unfortunately it exposed a weird side effect in our dragging code that's been on our list to fix for a while—so that would have to happen first. Also we're in the middle of large modernization effort that's touched a lot of stuff (it's all behind-the-scenes modernization, there should be no noticeable change on the site, ideally—it's just much easier on us working with modern javascript vs 20 year old javascript). So while I think it's a good change, I unfortunately can't just push it out today.
@david thanks for the detailed response! No worries, enjoy your modernization work. There's pleasure in that kind of infrastructure cleanup, I always found (back in the day when I did that stuff).