Facebook Trumps

At first the idea of challenging your friends to a game of Trumps appealed to me. A "My friends are better than yours", "no they're not", "let's prove it!" scenario. This would clearly have some humourous appeal and capture the imagination, however there is tension between this goal, the actual game "Trumps", technical possibilities and the requirements of internet privacy.

Playing Trumps "head to head", so far as I can reason, would require the following:

1. Player 1 and Player 2 each have a different set of card representing respective friends.
2. The game would need to be remotely multiplayer.

Just these two things are massively problematic. If Player 1 trumps Player 2, then does Player 1 "gain" that friend from Player 2? Player 1 could then cycle through their entire stack and trump Player 2 with one of Player 2's own cards! Completely undermines the "my friends better" principle.

What about privacy! Where Player 1 is playing a card who Player 2 is not friends with, or worse has blocked, you are revealing statistics derived from the private part of that friends profile. While the statistics are not going to be greatly revealing this goes against an important principle and most likely breaches the terms of the Facebook API.

If you were going to challenge someone to a game of "My friends are better than yours" you would want to play live. I will have more to say on this in the future, but the kind of asychoronous messaging system involved in this are beyond what my webhost can provide at present (I would probably need to use Jetty http://www.mortbay.org/ rather than Tomcat, otherwise I would need 1 thread per connection and likely the limited resources provided by my webhost would crash under load). At least for the first iteration of the game I want to play vs. a CPU.

Labels: facebook api, multiplayer, privacy, scalability, Trumps

On the face of it Facebook Trumps is a straightforward idea. You play Trumps with cards representing Facebook friends, with statistics derived from thier Facebook profile. When you get into the detail of it, however, to implement it as a computer game, you have to flesh out a bit of the detail.

Trumps is a traditional game which has been played for centuries (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/come-up-trumps.html). It is suggested that "Trump" is a 17th Century abbreviation of "Triumph", plausably- and that reference is made to the game in Shakespeare. The game was played with a traditional set of cards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_card) with one suit being arbitarily declared as the "trump" suit. If two players hold cards of the trump suit the highest card is taken as winner. The game is more familiar when played with a set of statistics. There is more on some of the familiar modern interpretations of Trumps here: http://www.ultimate-top-trumps.co.uk/, the website of a modern commercial variant of the game, "Top Trumps" is availible here : http://www.toptrumps.com/.

Broadly, the game is played with a stack of cards where each card displays a set of unique statistical values representing an individual entity- the statistics shown are uniform and comparable between cards. The game begins where the cards are shuffled and dealt between two or more players. A player then takes a turn, selecting the most fortuitous looking statistic on the top card of their own deck. Each other player declares their own value for that statistic, the player with the highest value winning the round. The winner of the round takes the losing cards of all the other players and places them on the bottom of their deck. The next player will then take their turn. You then lose by running out of cards. You win by collecting the entire pack.

Labels: Gameplay, Opponent, Trumps, Winner