Dealer’s Choice is my ultimate project. This is what I’ve wanted to do since I first started programming. First I made the all-important “10: print ‘Tom is Cool’; 20: goto 10”. As soon as that was done, I wanted to make the best game ever!
In my opinion, the most important game ever invented is not a game, but a game system: Playing cards. With a simple set of 54 items arranged and managed in a variety of ways, gamers have created hundreds, and thousands of game variants. Some of these variants are examples of the most important games in the world. So a card game system would be the best thing I could make.
Obviously there are lots of computer card games. There are many well-polished and streamlined implementations designed to play one game very well (and sometimes a couple of variants). Popular games such as Blackjack, Bridge, Canasta, Cribbage, Euchre, Gin, Go Fish, Hearts, Hold-em, Poker, Pinochle, Skip-bo, Sheepshead, Spades, and Uno abound. Yahoo games, for example, has versions of each of the above, and also a bunch of solitaire games. This is indeed an impressive breadth of gaming. But if you want to play more obscure games like Rikken, Ombre, 99, Indian Poker, Up and Down the River, In Between, Bullshit, Klabberjass, or any of the hundreds of other games listed at the likes of Pagat.com, you’re likely to have some trouble locating an implementation.
Dealer’s choice is not intended to be a well polished single implementation. It’s purpose is to provide the means to make just about any game playable. That vision is a long way from completion. But I believe it is possible. And I have started working toward its successful end.
For the moment, I have only a prototype user interface written in Processing. It does stuff, although it’s not really usable. I am working on making a JSON web service to synchronize play for players on different machines. This is mostly a learning exercise for me at the moment, but I’ve learned a lot about web service programming already.
Anyway, that’s all I have to say for now. Hope everyone who reads this has a really great rest of the day! Take care, all,