Show HN: Card game where players write their own cards that get parsed into code

It's an online tactical card game (inspired by games like Hearthstone and Magic: the Gathering), where players write their own cards in natural language, that gets parsed down to JavaScript. The English-to-JavaScript translation is handled by a semantic parser operating on a hand-crafted CCG grammar – kind of an “old-school” approach in this age of LLMs but one that performs quite well on the very constrained language of Wordbots cards.

The resulting game gets pretty wacky as players can create all sorts of cards, though there are some game formats that try to produce more balanced gameplay as well (e.g. one format in which both players shuffle their decks together, and various draft formats).

If you're curious about how it all works, I made a write-up about it here: https://app.wordbots.io/how-it-works

And if you want to chat about Wordbots beyond this thread, please don't hesitate to join our discord at https://discord.wordbots.io/ . I'd love to hear any and all feedback.

-Alex

Show HN: Card game where players write their own cards that get parsed into code
app.wordbots.io

I would also recommend linking to https://github.com/wordbots/wordbots-core/blob/v0.20.0-beta/... since the app.wordbots.io version seems to boot up some horrific amount of javascript or something, because the gears just sit there for about 15 seconds before the content finally shows up

Separately, do you know if the vocabulary for wordbots would tolerate the vocabulary for M:TG? IOW, is it possible to "port-over" some of the cards?

Wordbots doesn't have a built-in mechanism to enforce cards being at a "fair" power level. We initially had a few ideas for how to do it: some kind of machine-learning approach to determine how much "energy" a card should cost to play based on its text and stats, or having a server constantly simulating games between AI players with various cards to see how effective cards are in practice, or even a market-based mechanic where cards could be traded for in-game currency and how valuable a given card was would determine it's a "fair" card or not.

All of these approaches were ultimately abandoned as too complicated. Instead, we opted to just prioritize game formats where both players are equally likely to have access to any given card in-game:

  - In the Mash-up format, both players build a deck made up of any cards they want, but the two decks are shuffled together into one big deck that both players draw from.
  - In the Set format, players build their own separate decks but have to choose cards from a given "set" of cards curated by a player (and ostensibly the cards within a set should be roughly balanced).
  - In the draft formats (Set Draft and Everything Draft), both players are drafting from the same pool of crads.