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How you play Spades is how you play life

pudding.cool

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Re: How you play Spades is how you play life

#2
Apparently no mention of the variant that, in my experience as a kid, was by far the most common: no bidding, 1 point to the winning team, or 2 if you win 10 books. Commonly, you bet 5 or 10 as a team and won for being first to the amount bet.

I played or watched probably thousands of games in middle and high school and I don't think I ever saw anyone play the formal way.

Re: How you play Spades is how you play life

#4

Apparently no mention of the variant that, in my experience as a kid, was by far the most common: no bidding, 1 point to the winning team, or 2 if you win 10 books. Commonly, you bet 5 or 10 as a team and won for being first to the amount bet. I played or watched probably thousands of games in middle and high school and I don't think I ever saw anyone play the formal way.

Yeah and as a result my bidding is still for shit. I always chalked it up to half the class sharing/standing-around one deck so we had to keep swapping out who was playing any given hand.

Re: How you play Spades is how you play life

#5
I (as a white American) didn't know about this history, and have played Spades as a family game for as long as I can remember.

Some interesting variations - we usually played with no Jokers, no bag, but with a negative score rule when not meeting bid. Also, a card selection mechanic if 2 players are playing - the players would alternating picking cards from from the deck, decide whether they wanted it, then keep it and discard the next card, or discard and have to keep the next card. This prevents knowing exactly what the other player has in the 2 player scenario.

Re: How you play Spades is how you play life

#6
> How you play spades, is how you play life. When playing spades, you're dealt a hand and have no control over the cards you get -- unless you're cheating. Your primary goal is to play each round to the best of your abilities...

This is just "life is like a box of chocolates". I was hoping for some sort of actual prediction, where playing aggressively correlated with certain behaviors.

Re: How you play Spades is how you play life

#7

Apparently no mention of the variant that, in my experience as a kid, was by far the most common: no bidding, 1 point to the winning team, or 2 if you win 10 books. Commonly, you bet 5 or 10 as a team and won for being first to the amount bet. I played or watched probably thousands of games in middle and high school and I don't think I ever saw anyone play the formal way.

Never heard of that variant myself. Played constantly in high school, mostly during calculus and comp sci; wrote a game engine for it in C++ in that class.

Like poker, it's less about the cards and more about the social aspects. Actual card strategy is just table stakes. Can you bluff the other team into bidding too low or high? Can you read how your teammate bids and close the round accordingly? I've won plenty of games by forcing the other team to sandbag.

By leaving bidding out you are playing glorified war. I can see it for kids but it's not terribly interesting.

The only variant we'd play was a three player game where we'd have to remove a few cards to make the deck size a multiple of 3. Called it cutthroat because it's everyone for themselves. But we'd only play that if we couldn't get a fourth.

Re: How you play Spades is how you play life

#8
I have to say... what terrible UX !

Scroll right? In a world where literally everyone else scrolls down ?

Its completely un-natural if you're not using a tablet or smartphone ! Unless you have one of those fancy mice with the horizontal scroll button, but most people won't and will have to click and drag (rinse and repeat).

Re: How you play Spades is how you play life

#9

I have to say... what terrible UX ! Scroll right? In a world where literally everyone else scrolls down ? Its completely un-natural if you're not using a tablet or smartphone ! Unless you have one of those fancy mice with the horizontal scroll button, but most people won't and will have to click and drag (rinse and repeat).

Additionally the "cards" holding text sometimes ended up being too small to actually display all their text - causing sudden truncation and unreadable sentences.

I really dislike that everyone needs to avoid just having a string of paragraphs.

Lastly, the UX decisions made text unselectable for copying - and has prevented the author from actually injecting footer references for survey data and the like. It's a UI that makes the author fight against it to actually convey information.

Re: How you play Spades is how you play life

#10

I have to say... what terrible UX ! Scroll right? In a world where literally everyone else scrolls down ? Its completely un-natural if you're not using a tablet or smartphone ! Unless you have one of those fancy mice with the horizontal scroll button, but most people won't and will have to click and drag (rinse and repeat).

Works great on a Mac, which have horizontally-scrolling trackpads or mice.

But obviously they did this as a fun layout for a card game!

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