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Colorblind mode, plus Jere's request for advanced mouse-over graph updates.
We're nearing the public release of the game, so this version is a release candidate.
Full change log here.
Just finished putting this together:
There was a server outtage. MySQL went down, I think.
As we're nearing public release, I just added this landing page for new players:
http://cordialminuet.com/foyer.php
There's also a brand new how to play video there. I learned a lot by explaining the game 100+ times at PAX South.
Well, but Minosons is it for this game....
Okay, got this working in v13.
Oops... there's also a bug where if you win all the chips, you still get a penalty if you leave first.
Just fixed this.
Well, Jere, that is some advanced stuff that I never considered until I saw your GIF.
It's interesting that the column with the 6 does not LOOK better than the other one---in fact, pairwise, the numbers are almost entirely strictly worse, except for the 34. But, it turns out that, for game tree reasons, winning any number in that column, even the 6, will give you the highest possible score over the remaining possibilities your opponent could have (taking the one with the 6 will block then from getting 34, and if they stick you with a 6, that means they didn't get a 26 on one of their previous picks)
I've seen a lot of people toggling the columns back and forth on turn 3 and watching the graph, but toggling the columns and then mousing over to see what score you would actually have if you got one of those cells---that's potent stuff that I never considered.
And yeah, the same situation is solidified on the Turn 2 bet (you're in a situation where you can force a win on the next turn)---BUT, there's no way to access that information. I also agree that it's not practical to figure this out in your head in 60 seconds. The graph is showing you some pretty intense computerized insight in your GIF there.
Back to figuring out how to make this work.
Well, leaving with half your chips remaining, once you're down, is an important skill. Yes, it's really annoying when someone leaves before the end, or leaves when YOU are down before you can recover, but it's just as annoying in Poker.
What I REALLY don't want is people leaving after bullying a chip or two out of someone. That is not interesting at all.
In Poker, a player who is doing that will eventually get burned, because someone is going to have AA eventually and call them. Here, there is so much skill involved in your remaining picks that even getting a 36 on turn 1 is not enough to call an all-in bully, especially since you haven't learned to read them yet. In poker, if you have AA and call the bully, no further skill is required to win (though you can still lose, but your chances of winning are known at that point). Here, you could call with a 36 and still screw it up. Plus, calling gives your opponent lots of info about what you have, which they can use against you while picking in subsequent rounds.
So, I'm thinking that bullying a chip or two out of someone is a more viable strategy here than it is in Poker.
I was even thinking about that for Nate's $6000 game. Someone could just come in for one round, bully one chip out of him, and walk away with $60. I doubt he would call a big bet on turn 1.
Now, if someone does that, Nate would win $300 from that person.
Finally, with a fixed penalty and rising ante, the cost of leaving shrinks relative to the ante over time. This makes sense, because it's more feasible to leave after 6 or so rounds, which at least gives your opponent a decent game with you.
I hear you about it needing to be communicated better to the leaver. v13 will fix that.
Clicking on a cell says "Show me a graph as if I won this cell." If you're doing that at the end of turn 2, it will narrow your possible scores down to just one (your other two scores are set already).
Dragging column sliders does NOT do this. Instead, it says, "Show me a graph where I could get any of the four remaining numbers in this column."
Currently, clicking on a red cell does the same thing as above, but for your opponent (show me a graph where they scored this number for sure).
Anyway, this is why I think that clicking on a cell is not what you actually want here---you don't want to narrow your score graph down to one score. What you want is to be able to click a column for yourself at that point.
That could work.
Yes, if you leave in the middle of the current round, you'll lose what's in the pot (12) plus the ante for the next round (13).
I thought about having it only trigger at the very end of the round, but that would just train people to leave right before the round ended (like, after the reveal move, when they could tell they had won or lost, they would leave before the final reveal to avoid the penalty).
I'm not entirely sure that a rising penalty makes sense here. What we're really trying to prevent is someone who wins a coin or two and then leaves. Especially at higher buy-ins, this could become a viable strategy (join table, scare opponent with all-in on first move, then leave with 1 chip, which could be a $10 chip in a $1000 game---almost no one would match the first all-in, so this would earn the perpetrator $10 reliably).
I think I'm going to set a fixed leave penalty instead.
It is now set to 6 coins flat, no matter what round you leave.
As I'm moving toward implementing this.... I'm realizing that it will be too confusing if it behaves this way.
The mousing over the board to affect the graph is already confusing enough (watching people play in person at PAX, I saw people sometimes inspecting the graph without realizing that their mouse was over the board and thus altering the graph).
It makes enough sense for it to alter the graph when you mouse over a colored column. This also limits what you can mouse over, which reduces the amount that the graph jumps around unexpectedly. For example, before pick 1, with no sliders placed, mousing over the board does NOTHING to alter the graph at all.
Finally, it sounds like what you're really asking for is a preview of pick 3 back-and-forth before making your turn-2 bet. It's not like you really want to mouse over a square (because 2 of those uncolored squares are gone in each column anyway), but you want to be able to test-drag the sliders before making your turn-2 bet. So, even if I implemented mousing over uncolored squares as if they were green, it wouldn't give you what you wanted (what you want is a full column preview). Having mouse-over behavior at the end of turn 2 provide full-column previews on the score graph would be extra confusing.
So, I'm going to table this for now. Maybe a better solution will emerge in the future.
A lot of people have been asking about this.
After thinking about it, I realized that it is unfair that you can skip the next ante by leaving at the right moment. I don't think that online Poker tables allow you to do this, because the next ante flies in right away.
And, if we're going to say that the next ante is due at the end of this round, then what if you know you've lost this round and leave before that? That seems like yet another way to avoid it.
SO, I just changed the server so that whoever leaves both loses the pot AND pays the next ante to whoever stays, no matter when you leave during this round.
In v12, this shows up a little strange sometimes, with some coins flying into the center from the remaining player before flying back, but that's fixed in v13. Also, the display of the house tribute is messed up in v12 when one of these penalties is displayed (client behaves like penalty was one less and there was no rake as it displays coins flying for the remaining player).
Okay, there is now a leaderboard showing number of games played. See the original post.
There is only one English language solution to the anagram given the hint letters that are shown on the bottom line of Scrabble tiles. "Cordial Minuet" is just an anagram of that original phrase---the most fitting one that I could find.
Okay, so we're good here?
Sounds like you may have been using an out-of-date pull of minorGems....
Thanks for the feedback, folks!
SteelNovember, have you tried showing them the how-to-play video?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4HbCUAFUrA
It's a little rough. I'm going to make a new one before the game goes public. Also, there will be a better "Welcome" type page before launch.
Not currently... I guess it could be a leaderboard?
Configure just makes the makefiles for you.
Then you must:
cd gameSource
make
The Linux PAM module that supports YubiKey simply expects the Key to be appended to your password.
So, you ssh in, and the interactive password prompt comes up. Type your password, then press the button on the YubiKey to append the Key. Smartly, the YubiKey always includes an ENTER key press at the end of the key string, and in you go.
Cool UI there!
Well, thankfully there wasn't stuff like THAT in Blackhat, mostly. There was lots of real Linux in there, and the only hack that was done in the whole movie was done through a key logger and social engineering.
There was one other bogus thing, where they used the NSA's "Black Widow" top secret software to recover data from a corrupted hard drive. But they did it by copying the corrupted file from the HD and taking it with them somewhere else (the HD required a contamination suit to handle), and then applying Black Widow to the file without the original HD present.
I'm happy with the realism of the computer hacking in the film. I just think it wasn't a very good film. There were times when I was about to fall asleep. Dialog was classic Hollywood BS.
Thanks!
YubiKey is one of the coolest security things I've seen.
Unlike other one-time password generators, you don't have to manually type the password in. YubiKey plugs into your USB port and behaves like a keyboard. You press the button on it, and it types in the next generated password.
There's a simple web API for pinging YubiKey inc to verify that the generated code is correct, has never been used before (each one can only be used once, as it contains an ever-incrementing counter), and matches the account it's supposed to match. Internally, the YubiKey device is generating the pass code using a shared secret AES key that is embedded within it and known to YubiKey inc as well.
Thus, only if you have the physical YubiKey in your possession can you log in. Even if there's a key-logger installed on your machine, the passcode generated is blocked after being used once.
And if you lose your YubiKey, you just remove that one from the list of Keys that your server accepts. I have two backup keys that are also accepted by my server but that I never carry with me (one at home, one in a deposit box safe from fire), so even if I lose one key, I won't be locked out.
I found out about it because Fastmail supports it.
I just saw the movie Blackhat today (not a very good movie), and there was a YubiKey used in the movie! (Though they called it a fingerprint scanner, which it is not.)
Started another thread about that...
So... PAX South is over now, and I'm recovering in my hotel room before flying back home tomorrow to resume parent and programmer duty.
First of all, it was totally exhausting, explaining the game to people hundreds of times over 24 total hours of standing in three days. I hired my two cousins from Austin to help out in the booth---it would have been impossible to do alone---but there were many times when all three of us were on duty at the same time and explaining to different people in parallel. My cousins are both like, "Man, I don't want to ever do this again!"
(One of my cousins was the artist and architect who designed and built the booth---but he too was saddled with booth duty.)
We handed out 371 $1 bills that were marked with a secret "door" URL to get into the game, and we set up probably 150+ pairs of people to play the game against each other over the course of the show. I'd say that each pair played for about 10 minutes on average.
Lots of people who played REALLY liked the game, which was cool. Quite a few of them (roughly half) even plunked down their own money head-to-head against their friend or family member (brother against brother, husband against wife, and even mother against son). Others had no cash, so we handed them free dollars to play with.
A few pairs played with their own money for higher stakes---there were three $20 vs $20 games where one person walked away with $40.
There was even a banana wagered at one point.
BUT... was it worth it?
I'm watching the web meter, and so far a grand total of 39 people have come through the PAX-exclusive door URL. Yes, 12 more came in today, so it's not over yet, but still, it's not very many people.
Even if all 371 people came through, it wouldn't be that many, given how much time and money we put into this.
Thus, the value of being at PAX clearly cannot be measured by headcount.
A Kotaku article, by comparison, costs nothing, takes very little time, and reaches many thousands of people.
So, impact must figure in. The booth gives people a unique experience connected to the game. But how much does that experience matter?
For the 39 of you who saw the game at PAX and are now here, can you describe your experience of the booth? Is it something that impacted you? Did you tell your friends about it? Is it something that you will remember more than you would remember an article online?