World of Card Games

At World of Card Games, we follow the "Stick the Dealer" variation of Euchre. It goes like this: After the cards are dealt, a card is turned up, and each player in turn is allowed to accept this card as the trump suit. If no one chooses it, then each player in turn is allowed to name an alternate trump suit. It can happen that no one has a strong hand, so they don't want to risk naming the trump suit, and being required to take three tricks to score a point. In that case, no one names a trump suit, and the dealer is "stuck" with naming it. This can work out fine if the dealer has a strong hand, but it can be annoying, otherwise.



Today, a player wrote me that when he had played Euchre in the past, they had the custom of "throwing in a hand and passing the deal when all the players pass twice around the table." This is sometimes called a "misdeal."

This appears to be a common way of playing Euchre. However, it does make the game last a little longer. Each time there's a misdeal, no points are scored, and you have to go through the whole deal-and-choose procedure again before any cards can be played.

I'm curious to hear from Euchre players what they'd prefer. At this point, I wouldn't want to change any rules to the games, since I'm more focused on bug-fixing and adding a few new features. But for the future, I'd consider adding more variations to the rules, or even changing them if the majority prefer a specific variation.

Finally, variations in the rules of each game fragment the players onto different tables - 4 different players can be sitting at 2 different tables, waiting for a game to start, but without the variations they'd all be sitting at one table actually playing a game! That's another reason I'd rather not add more variations, now. If and when the site gets more players, more variations won't be such a problem.

[Edit Dec 8 2015: There is now an Option to turn off the "Stick the Dealer" rule.]

World of Card Games was unavailable for about 30 minutes this morning while some updates were applied. Here's a summary of the changes.

1) The "Kick Player" button is gone. No more kicking! In its place is the "Dislike Player" icon, a round red button with a white "x" in it. If you hover your mouse over this button, you will see the label "Dislike Player" appear (see screenshots below).




Clicking on this button will put the associated player on your "disliked players" list. My blog post about how to kick players tells you how to edit this list.

Once you have "disliked" a player, you will not be seated with them again. But other than that, they will not be affected.

2) There are five new avatars!

3) The robot strategy for Hearts has been modified (hopefully for the better). Changing the robot strategy is a "work in progress" - I'll be making small changes over time, with the goal of improving it overall.

4) Finally, there was a bug in Hearts that has been fixed. Normally, when shooting the Moon, 26 points should be added to all other players' scores. If this would cause the game to end with the shooter losing, only then should points be subtracted from the shooter's score. But there were some cases where points were deducted from the shooter's score even if the game was in no danger of ending. This led to some very long games! The bug has been fixed, and I am grateful to the person who pointed this problem out to me.


Here's wishing everyone an early Happy Thanksgiving!

The server suffered a glitch last night, and the site was malfunctioning for a few hours. It's back up and running this morning! Sorry for the inconvenience.

I got a few reports that the "Custom Cursor" setting was broken. This has been fixed, and the server was updated this morning with the change. Please let me know if you have any more issues with this.

In a little more detail: the mouse pointer on your screen usually looks like a white arrow. The "Custom Cursor" is an ornate version of that mouse pointer. See the screenshot below for a look:

The "Custom Cursor" is shown inside and to the right of the green circled area.

Sometimes, this feature can cause performance problems. If you have any trouble with it, you can turn it off and switch back to using the white-arrow mouse pointer. You do this by clicking on your user name (or Guest #) in the upper right corner, which opens your profile settings. Just uncheck "Custom Cursor" to turn it off.

The related bug caused the "Custom Cursor" to turn back on unintentionally. So if you were having this problem, you shouldn't see it happen anymore.

I had a couple of requests from people that they'd like an audible alert if someone arrives at the table where they're seated. In response to this, I've added a "shop bell" sound when someone arrives, and a "door shutting" sound when someone leaves.

I don't plan on adding any more sounds, since I don't want the site to get too noisy. Remember, if you don't like the sounds, there's an option to turn them off in your user profile area (click on your user name up in the top right corner to see this).

This morning, World of Card Games was down briefly as I applied a couple of updates.

I've added the sound of a "gong" when the game starts. This will help to alert people who are multi-tasking while they're waiting for a game to start. I realize that some people don't have sound for their computers... I'm not sure what to do to alert this group!

You can turn off the "gong" sound by visiting your profile (click on your user name at the upper right corner) and unchecking the "Play Sounds" box.

I've had requests from a couple of players to add some sound when a person sits at their table, before the game starts. I'm planning on doing this in the near future as well.

You will also notice that the site has some blank space at the right. I've been delaying putting an ad on the site, but I knew I'd have to do this sooner or later, and now is the time. I'll be experimenting with this over the next few weeks.

There was an outage at the site for about 5 minutes this morning while the server was being updated with a small bug fix. My apologies for the interruption!