Hi Tigre, Thank you for trying out the Pinochle game at World of Card Games!
>> I don't really have a strong negative feeling toward the meld view. I think it's fine, although the first time the meld was laid out, there was a gap between the ace of a suit (part of aces around) and the king (part of a marriage). While I understand why it was laid out this way, in my opinion it would be better if the cards of the same suit were next to each other even if they're not in sequential rank. But like I said, it wasn't terrible.
I want to make sure that I understand what you're saying, so I'm posting a screenshot. I think what you're talking about is that gap between the Aces column and the Kings column as shown in Robby's hand up top. Rosie's hand shows that this gap would normally be filled with rank 10 cards, if there were any in Robby's meld.
I assume this is the view you're talking about? And you would prefer the gap be filled if there are no 10s in the 10 column? How do you feel about Rosie's meld view, over on the left? My personal opinion (as a beginner) is that I like being able to see the column filled with Aces and know immediately that the person has an Aces Around. If I moved some Aces over to fill in the gap, I would find it a little complicated to read.
![[Image: 15-08-07-meld-view-matrix.png]](http://staticworldofcardgames.com/images/15-08-07-meld-view-matrix.png)
>> I thought the card-play animations were a little too slow. I'd recommend speeding up the card display animation - maybe by 50% - and leave the tricks up slightly longer to allow the player(s) to see the cards that were played in each trick.
Thank you for taking note of that! I am keeping a list of requests and suggestions and will act on whatever seems most popular. FYI - I've recently begun experimenting with making animations a bit faster at WoCG. It was only recently that someone complained that they thought the animations in Hearts are too slow, so I never put much thought into it.
>> The AI needs a little work.
That's a very nice way of putting it
>> I know you said you're learning the rules and strategies, but one obvious flaw was that in one hand my partner played an ace on my ace lead (first trick of the suit), then played jack-queen on my left-hand opponent's two aces in that suit. (I wasn't paying that close attention to know what was melded, but most of the time this would not be considered a good play regardless of cards melded.) On two other occasions, my partner played ace on ace and didn't have the remaining aces in the suit.
It will take me more time to figure out the subtleties of Pinochle strategy. I am hoping I can get this improved over time.
The first thing I did for the AI was to have your partner feed you point cards. I also have the AI lead with Aces generally. This is my own strategy and is no doubt rudimentary. It's possible that when you saw a bot play an Ace on your Ace, they were trying to give you the one point card that they had in their hand.
The bots should be playing Ace-on-Ace to tell you that they have the last remaining Ace in that suit. I will revisit this code to make sure it's done correctly. Of course, there are limits: sometimes you have no choice but to play an Ace.
Also, as I said above, if the Ace is the last remaining point card, it will get played on the partner's Ace to make sure they get it. Is this always considered poor play?
>> It would definitely be helpful if there were some way to view the last trick. Yahoo! used to have a button which brought up a small window that could be left open, and PlayOK (the current preferred site for online pinochle, since Yahoo!'s demise) always displays the last trick in the upper corner of the table. Either would be fine, although it's probably easier to just devote a little space to this on the main view.
I've had a few players tell me that they would like this in Hearts. I've been reluctant to add this, because I'm concerned that the page will become even more cluttered than it is now, and I don't have a feel for how many people want it. However, I could probably add it as an option for people who are interested in that - I think it would be fairly easy to do. It's mainly a question of finding the right spot to display it.
>> If you're really ambitious, I'd love for a place to play single-deck pinochle online. This is the game I grew up playing. I posted my family's rules for three-handed single-deck pinochle here and still need to post the rules for four-handed (partnership) single-deck pinochle, which was the variant most commonly played in my family. This became a little more difficult to write cohesively than I anticipated, and I never got back to it...but if you're interested, I could work on it!
I am ambitious, but as an individual developer I have only so much time. The site is called World of Card Games and I hope to add more and more games... I was aiming for Canasta or Cribbage or even Whist next. At some point I hope to add single-deck Pinochle, but since I just added the double-deck version, I probably won't do that for a while. Of course I'm also working on adding new features to help players communicate with each other a little easier too, and all that takes time.
Regarding other rules - the site manager at
Pagat appears to be pretty open to posting variations to rules on each game's page. I don't know if you've looked there, but perhaps you could add to his existing rules?
Marya
