Sunday 30 October 2011

My first Android app: Play Your Cards Right

Good Morning,

I've published my first app: "Play Your Cards Right". It's is a very simple 1 player card game I mainly built to learn the first priciples of android app development. 6 cards are drawn at random, the first is shown to the player who is invited to guess if the second is higher or lower. If they guess correctly the third card is shown, and so on until they either guess incorrectly (they lose) or all the cards are revealed (they win); you get nothing for a pair, not in this game; and aces are high.

The game is based on Bruce Forsyth's 80s classic of the same name:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_Your_Cards_Right

The game has also been adopted by my local pub—The Herne Tavernas the climax to its famous Sunday night quiz hosted by TV's Pietro Herrera: http://theherne.net/. As such, my App might be a useful practice tool for The Herne's loyal quiz goers. 

Although simple, it's a fun game and the win rate is much lower than you'd expect. My rusty statistical skills have thus far proven inadequate for calculating the theoretical probability of winning a game given the player always makes sensible choices. However I previously built a php web version here: http://dean.xtsl.net/tools/cards.php (thanks Simon!) and a means to ask Simon's machines to run through a number of simulations of the game based on some simple stratergies here: http://dean.xtsl.net/tools/cards/simulate.php


Current ideas for version 1.1 include: A log of results, and hints.


Thanks and good luck beating the game!
Dean


  

Saturday 29 October 2011