[Haskell-cafe] Card games

[Tom Tobin]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 8:07 AM, Felipe Lessa <felipe.lessa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 07, 2009 at 08:46:07AM -0500, Matthias Görgens wrote:
>> Interesting idea.  But I guess you should clarify what kind of card
>> games you want to support.  E.g, a DSL for trick taking games like
>> Bridge, Skat or Doppelkopf might be different from one that's good for
>> Canasta or Rummy.  Or do you aim at Solitaire?  I'd suggest starting
>> with a very small scope of the domain for a very first version.
>
> Hmm, good catch.  I was thinking about solitaire, i.e. single
> player, games.  Multiplayer card games certainly have their own
> set of interesting challenges.
>
> If I ever get to develop something capable of expressing nicely
> Patience, Spider, Pyramid and Black Hole I'll be more than
> satisfied :).

I'd be interested in something which could model games of Dominion
[1], as it's my current addiction; it's a (non-collectable) card game
where you build and tune your deck as you play, and aside from money
and victory point cards (which are always available) randomly has
available ten possible "action" card types to buy each game (out of
the total set of action card types — 76, as of the latest expansion).
There have already been various basic analyses of various possible
strategies assuming simple rules; if a strategy can't beat the
"baseline" strategy "Big Money" (which involves buying nothing but
money and victory points the entire game), it should probably be
scrapped.

[1] http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36218