
Bramcohen: A new card game - alexandros
http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/72957.html
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gjm11
Reminiscent of the even simpler game _Psychological Jujitsu_.

Take a pack of cards. Divide into suits. Discard the diamonds. Give one player
all the spades and one all the clubs. Shuffle the hearts and put them face
down.

Now repeat 13 times: turn up a card from the pile of hearts; each player
chooses one of their cards; they reveal them simultaneously; the player with
the higher card gets to keep that heart. (If the players play equal cards, no
one gets it.)

When you're done, add up the values of the hearts each player has won
(according to any convention you choose; different conventions give slightly
different games; I prefer A..K = 1..13 points). Highest total wins.

See <http://www.icynic.com/~don/psych.html> for more information. (That page
has diamonds and hearts the other way around from me, which of course makes no
difference.)

(I claimed that PJ is simpler than BC's game, but my description is longer
than his. No contradiction: he imported the standard ordering of poker hands
by reference, whereas I described all the rules of my game explicitly.)

~~~
pw0ncakes
If you enjoy that game, you might be interested in Reiner Knizia's High
Society. <http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/220/high-society>

~~~
eru
Or Kuhhandel.

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raganwald
One of the more interesting games I've seen is coöperative poker solitaire. In
poker solitaire, you are dealt 25 cards and lay them out in a 5x5 grid. You
try to make the best possible poker hands. The general scoring works by trying
to make the bets possible hands working down from a royal flush. So if you
have the cards for a royal flush, you have to make that. If you have the cards
for a lesser straight flush in the same suit but can't make the royal flush,
you don't have to make the lesser straight flush.

Anyhow, the really interesting game is a coöperative two player variant.
Thirteen cards are dealt to one player, twelve to another. Players cannot see
each other's cards. The player with thirteen places a card on the table, then
turns alternate. Once played, cards cannot be moved. At the conclusion of the
game, the cards must be arranged in a 5x5 grid. So technically the first two
cards could have three blank spaces between them diagonally, horizontally, or
vertically.

Pairs cannot communicate via any means other than the cards they choose to
play. So to play well, pairs generally work out a system for signaling what
they have, i.e. opening with a strong card and so forth.

~~~
mattmaroon
Have you ever played Chinese Poker?

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Darmani
This reminds me of Tichu. It shares the mechanic of trying to make poker hands
from passes, except that said poker hands are then played in a bizarre but
awesome combination of poker, bridge, and President's.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tichu>

~~~
pw0ncakes
Very well regarded on the Geek.

<http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/215/tichu>

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mattmaroon
Well, it's got only 2 rounds of betting and complete information. I can't say
it without trying it, but it doesn't sound very dynamic. Also the action will
be stalled because the cards have to remain there face up for some period of
time, so there won't be constant motion like there is in hold'em. It sounds
like correct strategy in most cases will be pretty obvious, though the choice
of 8 cards with half passed is interesting as it prevents you from, say,
holding a flush.

I can see it be interesting in one spot: if you see your opponent has 4
hearts, you don't pass them one regardless, unless one of the other 4 cards
they would be required to pass you make if they held the 4 hearts would make
you a full house. Then it's just a game of chicken.

It might be improved with the addition of hidden cards and splitting the
action over 3-4 rounds of betting.

Of course, I'm a little biased. After playing lots of 2-7 triple draw and
Badugi, I'm honestly not even interested in poker variants with as little
strategy as Texas Hold'em anymore.

~~~
bramcohen
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.

~~~
mattmaroon
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
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
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
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
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.

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pw0ncakes
Interesting concept. It makes the low cards valuable because they're more
likely to be tossed, so you can pair or triple them up. There was a similar
poker game I used to play with friends.

This is similar to how, in Gin, face cards can be useful because they're the
ones that an opponent is likely to toss early because their deadwood count
(penalty to you if unmelded) is so high. Kings are usually crappy, but if you
have a pair and an opponent tosses one (which he will if he can't do anything
with it) you now have a meld.

