Write to us
We read everything and answer in plain English. Bug reports, rules arguments and feature requests are all welcome, and so is telling us the game did something strange that you cannot reproduce.
Four things make a problem much faster to sort out:
- Which device was running the table, and which devices were the players
- The iOS or iPadOS version on each
- How many were playing, and whether any chairs had bots in them
- What you expected to happen, and what happened instead
There is no account to lose access to and nothing to reset, so we will never ask you for a password.
The five things that go wrong
- The phones cannot find the table
- Nine times out of ten this is the local network permission. iOS asks for it once, at the moment the app first tries to look around, and a phone that answered Don’t Allow then finds no tables ever again without saying why.
- Open
Settings › Privacy & Security › Local Networkand switch Gimme Five on. Check the iPad running the table too, not just the phones: a table that is not allowed to announce itself is invisible to every phone in the room, and the symptom looks identical. - Wi-Fi or Bluetooth is off
- The devices reach each other using their own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios rather than a router, so both want to be switched on even somewhere with no network to join. Being connected to nothing is fine. Being switched off is not.
- Airplane mode turns both off. On a plane, put the phone in airplane mode and then turn Wi-Fi and Bluetooth back on, which is allowed and is what the game needs.
- A phone locked, or a call came in
- The seat is held for that player. When the phone comes back to the app it asks for the chair it was in, and the table sends that hand and the board over again. The game carries on rather than starting over.
- If the app was force-quit rather than backgrounded, the same thing happens on the next launch, as long as the table is still running.
- The Deal button says it is waiting for players
- Every chair has to be filled before a deal, and a table is set for two, four or six. Nothing deals at five.
- Either drop a bot into the empty chairs from the table screen, or set the table to the number of people you actually have. A bot is dealt a hand and plays by the same rules as anyone else.
- An invite link opened a web page
- That is what the link does when Gimme Five is not installed on that phone. Install the app and tap the same link again; the second time it opens the game.
- The link is never required. On the join screen the phone lists the tables it can see, and choosing one by name gets you to the same place.
Somewhere with no signal, and somebody without the app
This one has no fix and it is better said outright than discovered at a campsite. Nothing moves an iOS app from one phone to another. AirDrop sends a link, not an application, so a phone with no signal cannot install Gimme Five however much the table wants it to.
Get everyone installed while there are still bars on the drive out. If you are already there and somebody missed it, pass and play is the way to still get a game: the whole thing runs on one device that goes round the table, and it holds your hand back until you say you are the one holding it.
Rules questions
Three rules in Gimme Five are decisions rather than inheritance, because no rules text we could find settles them. If your table plays one of them differently, you are not wrong and neither is the app, and we would like to hear about it.
- Trading in a card that has nowhere to go costs you your turn, and buys you one card.
- When the deck runs out, the cards already played are shuffled and dealt again.
- The player to the dealer’s left goes first.
How the rest of it works is on the Gimme Five page.
Privacy, refunds and the rest
Gimme Five collects nothing and has no server, which the Gimme Five privacy policy sets out in full. That policy covers the app; this website is covered separately by the detroit.games privacy policy.
Purchases and refunds are handled by Apple rather than by us, so a refund request goes through reportaproblem.apple.com. If something about the app itself went wrong, write to us first and we will try to fix it.