Working with the Holtz program

Starting a new game

You can choose to start either a Zèrtz, Dvonn, or Relax game from the File menu. This leads to a wizard interface for choosing the settings and players of the new game:
 

 
On the first page of the game setup wizard you can choose either to "Play Alone" or to play with friends over a network connection. If you already started a new game and enter the game setup wizard once more, you can also select "Keep last game connection". This keeps the configuration from the last game and keeps network connections alive. All other options will interrupt existing network connections.
 

 
The second page of the game setup wizard offers several options to define the game to be played. You can either select "Start new game" or "Continue game". The new game options between Zèrtz and Dvonn differ slightly.
Dvonn offers to play with "Standard Rules" or "Random Start Board". The latter chooses purely random positions for all pieces which skips the part of placing pieces and lets you start right away with stacking pieces.
Zertz offers to play with "Basic Rules", "Standard Rules", "Tournament Rules", or to select "custom" settings which will be set on the next page of the wizard. For basic rules, the requirements to win the game are 3 white, 4 grey, or 5 black marbles, or 2 of each. For standard rules and tournament rules it is 4 white, 5 grey, 6 black, or 3 of each. Basic and standard rules use a 37 ring board whereas tournament rules use a 48 ring board.
For "Continue game" it is possible to continue the last game or to load games from PBM or Little Golem. In case of PBM you should copy all emails in a folder. When Holtz scans the folder it can assemble a board setting from several email files. Little Golem offers the download of TXT files for Dvonn which can also be placed in a folder and loaded in Holtz.
 

 
Custom settings for Zèrtz offer to choose boards with different numbers of rings, to choose the win condition as a set of marbels required to win, and to choose the commonly available marbles.
 

 
The last page of the game wizard is a dialog to setup the players participating in the game. You can enter the player name on the top and hit "Add Player" to add a new player to the list. The checkbox "AI" determines whether newly added players are controlled by an AI strategy. The radio buttons under "Help mode" also have effect on newly added players and can activate helps like to show possible moves or to show hint moves.
Players in the list can be moved up and down or removed with the buttons on the right. In network games the "Ready" button signals the end of making changes and the text line on the bottom gives instructions on adding more players, or pushing the "Ready" button. "Please continue" tells that all settings are ok and a game can be started by pushing the "Finish" button.

Playing Zèrtz

 

 
The status bar of Holtz tells you at any time which kind of move you should play. In order to make a set move you can click on a marble to set which must be one of the common marbles if possible and one of the private marbles otherwise. After selecting the marble you can place it by clicking on an empty ring. Don't forget to remove one of the outermost rings after each set move if possible. In order to make a jump move you can click on a marble on the board and on the destination field for the jump. If this marble can jump further, the marble will stay selected and you just need to click to further destination fields.
While the game is not finished the player to make a move is marked in red. Marbles captured by a player are displayed below his name.

Playing Dvonn

 

 
In the phase of placing pieces every player just clicks on the destination field to place a piece. The player to make a move is marked in red. After the three DVONN pieces the first player to set his own piece is black. The last piece on the board is placed automatically and doesn't count as a move. If you are annoyed by move reminder sounds, you can disable them with the settings dialog.
 

 
In the phase of stacking pieces every player can click on pieces or stacks controlled by him and move them by clicking on the destination field. A stack can only move in a straight line on an occupied field. The distance of the jump is determined by the number pieces in the stack to be moved. The size of stacks with more than one piece is written on the top. The screenshot above shows how the help mode "show possible moves" marks possible moves during this phase.

Playing Relax

The piece to play in a round is shown at the top. The highlighted player can set this piece on any field of his board by clicking on the desired position. When all local players moved, you will see also moves done by remote players. If a remote player is highlighted, you are waiting for this player to move. Show possible moves doesn't make sense for this game, since all empty fields are viable for set-moves. Also undo is generally disabled and the variant display is mostly useless.

Settings

After a game is started, a settings dialog can be opened from the "Settings" Menu:
 

 
The arrangement tab allows to define whether coordinates should be shown around the board. For Zèrtz it also allows to choose arrangement options for the game panels. An interesting alternative to the default settings might be to show the board "horizontally" and to choose "board and common stones left". In case you like to have a better view on the precise count of marbles, you can disable the checkboxes for displaying them individually.
 

 
The "Look & Feel" tab offers the choice of a different skin file. Holtz ships with several skins in different sizes to take account for different screen resolutions. Despite the identical skin format, most of the skins, are rather useful for Zèrtz than for Dvonn.
A beep file can be chosen as move reminder. But you can also deactivate it by disabling the checkbox in front of "Play sounds". For player names, coordinates, and for text on stones, different fonts may be chosen.
If you invest lots of time in choosing your display settings, please bear in mind that only skin file, beep file, and play sounds is saved and restored the next time you run Holtz.

Networking

 

 
In order to play Zèrtz or Dvonn over the network, one player can setup the game as server and other players can connect to it as clients.
For setting up a server you can just choose a port and continue with the next page to setup a game to play. You may have to figure out how to deal with your firewall to allow accepting connections on the specified port.
Clients have to enter the hostname and port of the server to connect. You can click the "Connect" button to establish a connection and see with the text on the left whether the connection attempt succeeds. Hitting the "Next" button without connecting first will also trigger a connect and switch to the next page in case the connection succeeds. Clients have only a limited game setup wizard which just allows to add his players and wait for the server to choose a game to play.
 

 
When starting a network server, an additional dialog is displayed containing all active connections. Don't close this dialog if you want to see what clients are connected or if you want to change whether new clients can connect to the server. If you don't disallow further connections it is also possible to connect with a client during the game and just view the moves played.
During network games only the player to move can ask to undo moves or to start a new game without aborting the connection. In case of finished games it is the player who didn't do the last move.