Deal Generator User Guide

Tutorial: the many (well, three) colors of deal generation--grey, red, and yellow

This is one of several user guides on specific topics. The directory for all user guides is here.

Buttons that cause deals to be generated come in one of three designer colors: grey, red and yellow. Besides being darned attractive, these colors tell you something important about how the underlying functions work.

Grey deal-generating buttons are guaranteed to find or create a valid deal, and very quickly. They do not have to search through a sequence of random deals, as they shuffle the deck randomly just one time and give you the first resulting deal.

There are four red deal-generating buttons on the page. Their exact use is explained elsewhere in the User Guide. Here, I’m just telling you why they are red. The red color is a reminder that those buttons cause a potentially long-running search for a deal that conforms to the Cards, or Shaper, or both, of the Recipe. It is entirely possible that the generator will not find a conforming deal, so success is not guaranteed.

The four yellow deal-generating buttons are similar to the red buttons, except that they look for deals that do not conform to the Shaper (that is, they negate the Shaper). They are yellow as a warning that they may perform the same kind of long-running and potentially unsuccessful search that the red buttons perform.

If a red or yellow deal-generating operation fails to find a deal, see if you need to increase your Maximum Number of Shuffles setting, or else verify that your recipe does not describe an impossible deal (e.g. did you select both “Balance” and “Unbalanced” for the shape of one hand?).