Card Game Review (June 13 2025)

I’ve decided what my next game will be. It’s an expansion to Shelf Puzzles, that game I mentioned a while ago. The motivation is wanting to take a break from card games, and also because that game’s not on my website. (Meanwhile making another game like Sky Attack isn’t too enticing, as you can already play Sky Attack). Plus I could reuse some platformer code from that 2024 Collection game, which makes the setup work easier. Currently I just have most of the mechanics from the original game: you can pick up boxes and they can’t move through purple barriers. One new thing is that you can throw boxes into the air, that could be fun. There aren’t any new levels so far.

Since it’s a brand new project, that means it was time to try out something new for me: test cases. They’re pieces of code that, with a click of a button, can make sure parts of my code work properly. They’ve required some work to get started, but I’ve developed some systems to make things easier. It turns out I can create little scenes with the bare minimum required for a test to work, and the test case can load that scene and perform the actions needed. I feel that test cases that check for simple things like “did this UI thing show up” or “did this function return the right thing” aren’t very useful, but things like “did this specific set of actions do the right thing” are more worth the effort.

But also yesterday mom had me play a card game with 2 other people. I don’t know what the game is called, but I’ve definitely played it years ago. It seems like it’s a Chinese folk game with 2 decks of traditional playing cards, where you try to get rid of all your cards. As the least experienced player, and the one who understood the rules the least, I expected to lose a bunch of times. But I actually won my fair share of games somehow.

It was fun but there are things I didn’t like about it. It was difficult for me to learn all the different ways you can string together cards, which is why I usually stuck with the ones I knew. I didn’t even know you could put out 2 pairs or 2 triplets for a long time. There was also nothing to remind you of what you could do, which is what makes Chess awful for me. That’s why I like my card games to have instructions written on the cards.

Another thing I didn’t like was what happened after a round was over. The winner gets to give the loser their worst card, while the loser has to give them their best card. When I was younger and I’d play this game this was very frustrating as it just meant you’re more likely to keep losing; nowadays I still don’t like it. But also in this game the best card constantly changes, which doesn’t really change anything. All it does is force players to ask/memorize which is the best card. Even mom constantly forgot about it, and they’ve played the game way more than me. In general I’m not very interested in mechanics where one round affects the next round, you don’t get anything out of that. A much better way to mix things up is like Dominion, where you play with different cards.