Just to sanity check two things:

1) It works if you use -g 1234?
2) You have a single change in that branch, with everything committed locally?

1) didn't try the remote patch. 
This is a local test branch so didn't upload it to remote. I want to test a patch which is based on another patch, testing it with remote branch gave an error saying that the first patch isn't marked as +2 CR, so it failed to apply the second patch. So I created a local test branch to merge the two patches into one to test them locally.

2) yes.

+2 shouldn't be required, but I'm not surprised that you got the error.

I'll try to figure it out. Is this a huge blocker?

https://uberchromegw.corp.google.com/i/chromiumos.tryserver/builders/pre_cq/builds/79211 gives the error.

It'll be good to be able to test changes locally as before, not a huge blocker.

The following revision refers to this bug:
  https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/chromite/+/033ed909d5f367f33397e80294d11b6115c21170

commit 033ed909d5f367f33397e80294d11b6115c21170
Author: Daniel Erat <derat@chromium.org>
Date: Fri Feb 02 02:08:49 2018

chromite: Add --help warning about cros tryjob -p bugginess.

Warn people away from using cros tryjob's -p flag.

BUG=chromium:806963,chromium:807834
TEST=manual: ran "cros tryjob --help" and saw warning

Change-Id: I2d56d2e53dae57433a42acb6e94766623d37a80a
Reviewed-on: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/896963
Commit-Ready: Dan Erat <derat@chromium.org>
Tested-by: Dan Erat <derat@chromium.org>
Reviewed-by: Jacob Kopczynski <jkop@chromium.org>

[modify] https://crrev.com/033ed909d5f367f33397e80294d11b6115c21170/cli/cros/cros_tryjob.py

At least it's documented now.

We have a ton of weird bugs with local CLs. Preliminary proposals have been discussed, but not prioritized.