NOTICE: This post was originally posted on Medium, but has later been moved to the official World Of Card Games blog to consolidate all posts.
This week, I got an email from someone who had recently started playing cards at World of Card Games. The person was upset! When he clicked on the big Spades image to play a game, he’d very often be seated at a game that was already in progress. And worse, his team was losing, and the game was about to end.
That’s not fair, he said. It was a problem. But the real problem was that he didn’t realize that this situation was entirely under his control.
When you visit World of Card Games for the first time, and click on a game “button”, you don’t get taken to a game table immediately. Instead, you will see a dialog that looks like the screenshot below.
In this example screenshot, the person just clicked on the Spades button. The dialog reads: How would you like to play “Spades”? And it gives you a few simple Options.
- Play against the computer (with “robots”)
- Play against people, with “robots” allowed
- Exclude Games in Progress
- Remember this choice (you can change ALL settings later by using the ‘Options’ button)
There are two buttons below these choices: “Go to table” and “Cancel”. Hopefully, it is obvious what they mean. If you click the “Go to table” button, you will be seated at a table with your selected Options applied.
In the example screenshot above, the “Exclude Games in Progress” checkbox is checked. If you click the “Go to table” button at this point, you’ll be taken to a table where the game has not yet started. And since you’ve got “Play against the computer” selected, your game will be against robots, and no people will be allowed at your table. If you want your Options to be saved, check the “Remember this choice” checkbox before clicking the “Go to table” button. Otherwise, you’ll see this dialog every time you click a game button.
At this point, I can imagine some people reading this are puzzled. They’re thinking “Marya, that’s crazy! Why don’t you just make sure that everyone gets seated at a table where the game hasn’t yet started.”
Here’s my answer. There are many people who just want to play one or two hands of a game, and then be done. Maybe they want to take a quick break from some boring task. Or they just just don’t have time to play a full game. After all, while some full games can take only 10 minutes, others can last for 40 minutes or more.
In fact, I’m one of the people who sometimes plays a hand or two. I do this for a couple of different reasons. Sometimes, I’m just taking a short break and I want to clear my head. I don’t have the time for a full game — but I want to finish a shorter game. At other times, I may have time for a longer game, and I find it interesting to get seated in the middle of a game to see if I can turn the tables and come back to win.
I’ve tried to make World of Card Games very flexible so that different people can use it in different ways, depending on their preferences. You don’t like being taken to a game that’s already started? You can fix that! If somehow you’re not seeing the dialog that I described above, you can still adjust your Options. Every game has its own Options that you can customize. Click the Options button, shown in the screenshot below.
Clicking the Options button will open a dialog like this:
Check the “Exclude Games in Progress” checkbox. Then click the OK button to save your new Options. Now you won’t be joining games right in the middle anymore. Have fun, and be nice 🙂