The sounds are interesting and go really well with headphones or earbuds. Settings lets you enable/disable sound, enable/disable game (foreground) sound, and choose between natural or game-like foreground sounds.
When you start the app, Start starts a game. If you have the game I guess you did that already, and looked at the shorter version of Help there too.
You pick up 1 jack (a solid circle), then 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, then "7", except that if you didn't make any mistakes, at that point there are only 4 left - it's fine for the last pickup if you pick them all up and the number doesn't exceed what's asked for. At that point that game is over and you get a score depending on how fast you were. Then you can start again.
The number to pick up is in the title bar after the name Jacks and the score so far. Often you will know what it is without looking, but it's not hard to forget when concentrating on other things. If you don't pick up the right number, then instead of picking them up, the game leaves them there and may give a penalty by putting down more. It'll give you another try with the same number before starting to decrease the number it asks for. This is intended to help someone starting to have difficulty, but might be forgotten in the heat of the action.
The way you pick up the jacks is to touch a finger, or some people use a thumb, to the screen and leave it touching - moving it all the while as may be helpful - while the circle that represents the hand in the traditional game grows larger, until it completely encloses the desired number of jacks, but no more. In case you overshoot the circle will cycle back to smaller. It's Ok if the circle touches, though doesn't enclose, other jacks. Then at that moment, lift the finger, and if all went well, the jacks disappear.
If you're like me, the patterns of small numbers are quickly seen, but larger numbers take longer. Counting takes a longer than recognizing the pattern, but you've gotta do what you've gotta do. Pattern recognition gets better with practice.
The game ships with the hand growing quite slowly, to allow a new user to get used to the mechanism, but soon you'll want to go to the Settings and choose a faster growth. There's also an option for some people who use a thumb and would like the circle more above their thumb's contact point than centered around it. Also an option to keep the game from switching orientations (landscape / portrait) when you move the device. It starts a new game if you switch orientation in the middle of one; the pattern of jacks you were working with wouldn't fit.
Below all those options in Settings are the difficulty levels. The jacks start changing color, then moving, and then are different sizes. There are different background sounds.
Now, about problems. Look at the Known Problems tab here to see if something about the problem has been posted, and if not, make a new post about it. If you think you've found a bug in the app, Help has a Debug button that prepares an email to send me via Gmail or other, with technical info about the device (nothing personal, look and see), below a place for you to tell me what was going on. The more detail you give the better; there's a large limit for the combination of what you write and the already filled in tech info. I can't promise to fix it; beside time limitations, for another thing I only have my own phone to test with; but at least I'll consider it. I'll post problems that I can verify in some way.
That's all I can think of for the moment. Feel free to post comments, questions, or help for other people. Thanks!
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