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My game is more comparable to chinese poker than regular poker, as far as kind of strategy goes. The case of having to pick between several plausible hands is a

My game is more comparable to chinese poker than regular poker, as far as kind of strategy goes. The case of having to pick between several plausible hands is actually the common one. Someone who always picks the 'best' set of cards is very easy to beat. I have heard that lowball is a very interesting game, and it does appear possible to do a lot of reads based on available information, although there's a lot less to see if you're just watching than there is in hold'em.

pw0ncakes 17y ago
Have you designed other card games? What do you think of the other internet-published esoteric card games (e.g. Ambition, Ludic)? Any favorites?
- bramcohen 17y ago
  I've designed other games, but not many other good games. Mostly I invent mechanical puzzles. Ambition and Ludic are oddball concepts which inherently can't ever get mainstream appeal. I try to make things with much more widespread appeal.
  - pw0ncakes 17y ago
    Ambition and Ludic are oddball concepts which inherently can't ever get mainstream appeal. Interesting. Explain. It's very cool to talk to someone who has heard of these games. I think this may true of Ludic, since it effectively uses a function as a game object (it's a card game that steps into higher-order function territory). What about Ambition? On the surface, it just seems like a somewhat more complicated than average trick-taking game.
    - bramcohen 17y ago
      Ambition I had to look up, Ludic I already knew. The short explanation is that both of them have way too much potential for collusion, malicious or not, to really work as serious tournament games.
      - pw0ncakes 17y ago
        Ludic is more of a concept game. How would collusion work in Ambition? I tend to agree that neither would make a good tournament game. Ludic for the reason stated above; if you're going to introduce something "second-order" as a game variable, you need to contain it. Ambition because it's a 4-player game without teams, and most of the tournament games tend to be either 2-party (Chess, Go, or Bridge, the latter being a contest between two teams) or have a 1-vs.-N flavor like Poker. Ambition seems to have the Puerto Rico property of being very solid against certain kinds of annoying luck, but having a strong table-position element.
mattmaroon 17y ago
Chinese Poker suffers from the same flaw I perceive here, which is that how to set your hand is a rather simple algorithm. For the most part players fit into two tiers, those who get it and those who don't. Those who do will abuse the ones who don't, but if all 4 players are in the same tier it's just random who wins. Playing it with a 2-7 lowball hand in the middle adds a bit of complexity, but not enough to make the game really interesting. Lowball is a thing of beauty. The amount of tools an expert 2-7 triple draw player has at their disposal is unparalleled.
- bramcohen 17y ago
  There's a lot more to this game than chinese poker, try it and you'll see. I don't disagree that it has a lot less to it than lowball, it might even be possible to write a program to compute ideal play for it, but doing so is distinctly non-trivial, and it requires some distinct effort to play reasonably on even typical hands, much less the interesting ones.
  - mattmaroon 17y ago
    I'll give it a shot. Luckily I have one other ex-pro poker player in the office with me :) Unfortunately from a gambling perspective, 2 rounds of betting would probably preclude this from catching on. The only game I can think of with that is 5 card draw, and nobody's played that in years.
    - bramcohen 17y ago
      I understand your perspective, but chinese poker is a popular gambling game, and so is blackjack for that matter, so not everybody has the same taste in games as you do :-) The obvious way of bolting gambling onto this game is to simply have an even money bet on every deal. Note that the cards are initially dealt out face up, which makes the whole game really just be one round as in chinese poker.
      - mattmaroon 17y ago
        I wasn't speaking from the perspective of what I like. I don't like a lot of games that are popular. Chinese poker isn't very popular really, you'd be hard pressed to find a casino that spreads it. I played it a decent amount when I was playing poker for a living, but it was more like 4 guys just found an open table and played. Blackjack's easy because the dealer can play like an automaton, and the game moves really, really fast. If your game could have a dealer algorithm (like Pai Gow) you might be able to sell it as a table game. Breaking into that is extremely hard though.

pw0ncakes 17y ago

Have you designed other card games? What do you think of the other internet-published esoteric card games (e.g. Ambition, Ludic)? Any favorites?

bramcohen 17y ago
I've designed other games, but not many other good games. Mostly I invent mechanical puzzles. Ambition and Ludic are oddball concepts which inherently can't ever get mainstream appeal. I try to make things with much more widespread appeal.
- pw0ncakes 17y ago
  Ambition and Ludic are oddball concepts which inherently can't ever get mainstream appeal. Interesting. Explain. It's very cool to talk to someone who has heard of these games. I think this may true of Ludic, since it effectively uses a function as a game object (it's a card game that steps into higher-order function territory). What about Ambition? On the surface, it just seems like a somewhat more complicated than average trick-taking game.
  - bramcohen 17y ago
    Ambition I had to look up, Ludic I already knew. The short explanation is that both of them have way too much potential for collusion, malicious or not, to really work as serious tournament games.
    - pw0ncakes 17y ago
      Ludic is more of a concept game. How would collusion work in Ambition? I tend to agree that neither would make a good tournament game. Ludic for the reason stated above; if you're going to introduce something "second-order" as a game variable, you need to contain it. Ambition because it's a 4-player game without teams, and most of the tournament games tend to be either 2-party (Chess, Go, or Bridge, the latter being a contest between two teams) or have a 1-vs.-N flavor like Poker. Ambition seems to have the Puerto Rico property of being very solid against certain kinds of annoying luck, but having a strong table-position element.

mattmaroon 17y ago

Chinese Poker suffers from the same flaw I perceive here, which is that how to set your hand is a rather simple algorithm. For the most part players fit into two tiers, those who get it and those who don't. Those who do will abuse the ones who don't, but if all 4 players are in the same tier it's just random who wins. Playing it with a 2-7 lowball hand in the middle adds a bit of complexity, but not enough to make the game really interesting. Lowball is a thing of beauty. The amount of tools an expert 2-7 triple draw player has at their disposal is unparalleled.

bramcohen 17y ago
There's a lot more to this game than chinese poker, try it and you'll see. I don't disagree that it has a lot less to it than lowball, it might even be possible to write a program to compute ideal play for it, but doing so is distinctly non-trivial, and it requires some distinct effort to play reasonably on even typical hands, much less the interesting ones.
- mattmaroon 17y ago
  I'll give it a shot. Luckily I have one other ex-pro poker player in the office with me :) Unfortunately from a gambling perspective, 2 rounds of betting would probably preclude this from catching on. The only game I can think of with that is 5 card draw, and nobody's played that in years.
  - bramcohen 17y ago
    I understand your perspective, but chinese poker is a popular gambling game, and so is blackjack for that matter, so not everybody has the same taste in games as you do :-) The obvious way of bolting gambling onto this game is to simply have an even money bet on every deal. Note that the cards are initially dealt out face up, which makes the whole game really just be one round as in chinese poker.
    - mattmaroon 17y ago
      I wasn't speaking from the perspective of what I like. I don't like a lot of games that are popular. Chinese poker isn't very popular really, you'd be hard pressed to find a casino that spreads it. I played it a decent amount when I was playing poker for a living, but it was more like 4 guys just found an open table and played. Blackjack's easy because the dealer can play like an automaton, and the game moves really, really fast. If your game could have a dealer algorithm (like Pai Gow) you might be able to sell it as a table game. Breaking into that is extremely hard though.