World of Card Games

This morning, the server was down for a brief time in order to apply some updates.

Registered players can now chat after their game has finished at World of Card Games! After the game finishes, you will now see three buttons: "Home", "Chat", and "Play ..." (see screenshot below).

Click Chat button to chat with the Registered players after your game

Clicking the "Home" button takes you back to the main home page, where you can decide what new game you want to play. Clicking the "Play ..." button takes you directly to a new game of the same type that you just finished (for example, Hearts or Spades).

Clicking the "Chat" button takes you to a "chat" table where only the registered players from the game you just finished are invited. This gives you time to discuss the game in as much detail as you like, should you care to do so. The "Chat" button goes away after 30 seconds, so be sure to use it as soon as possible if you are interested in a chat with your group of players. Caveat: No one is obliged to go to the chat table, so you may find that no one joins you there.

If any who played with you goes to the chat table after your game is finished, this chat table will show up in the list of tables. Here's a screenshot of how to recognize it:

"chat" table shows up in the list of tables

Another new feature is the ability to save your "hand history" in Spades. The hand history is already familiar to those who play Euchre. Registered players can download the history of their previous hand, and replay it in the browser to review all the cards played, one step at a time. In Euchre, this feature can be a nice tool to discuss strategy. It is also very useful to report bugs in the bots to me. I'm hoping Spades players will find it useful as well. Sometimes, people report problems with the bots, but it's too time-consuming for me to figure out just what happened. With this new feature, if the bots make a boneheaded mistake, you can grab the hand history and send it to me with a description of what went wrong. I will be more likely to fix a problem when I know exactly what happened, and can reproduce the issue.

To download the hand history, click the old-fashioned "floppy disk" icon that appears next to your avatar after a hand has finished. You can see what it looks like in the screenshot here.

Click the floppy disk icon to download the hand history in Spades

Hm, I can't believe I just called a floppy disk "old-fashioned"! :)

Another important change: at ranked tables, the Elo ratings now reward the first-place player only. Elo ratings in Hearts was discussed in the previous blog post. I did not receive a lot of feedback, one way or the other, about this... but most players appear to like the idea, so I've made the change. I will continue to keep track of any feedback on the issue. Please post to Facebook or Twitter or here on the blog if you have comments. (FYI: anonymous posts are not treated very seriously; anyone can post anonymously multiple times, so I don't consider them to be so useful.)